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#Pratchat11 Notes and Errata

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These are the show notes and errata for episode 11, “At Bill’s Door“, featuring guest Sarah Pearson, discussing the 1991 Discworld novel Reaper Man.

  • Hard Quiz is an ABC game show, currently in its third series, in which contestants nominate a specialist topic and are grilled with exceptionally difficult questions by comedian Tom Gleeson. Contestants are eliminated each round, and the winner takes home a trophy known as the “Big Brass Mug”. (As is standard for quiz shows on the national broadcaster, there’s not a valuable prize.) Sarah appeared on the 17th episode of series two, up against horse expert Charles, French & Saunders expert Daniel and JFK expert Marc. (The ABC are currently alternating new and repeat episodes, so Sarah’s episode should reappear on iView a few months after this Pratchat!)
  • Sarah mentions captioning the Australian versions of reality TV shows Survivor (in its third series) and The Bachelor (season six, starring former rugby union player Nick Cummins), both on Channel Ten.
  • The previous Eurovision winner was Israel’s Netta with the song “Toy”, featuring some non-speech vocalisations which would make Cyril the rooster super envious. You can watch the official music video and the Eurovision grand final performance on YouTube. (Tellingly, neither video includes captions!)
  • Morris Dancing is traditional British form of folk dance kept alive not just in the UK but wherever British immigrants and their descendants are found. A group who dances the Morris are known as a “side”, and in Australia they are loosely affiliated via the Australian Morris Ring. Ben would like to give a shout out to his local side, Brandragon Morris, which still boasts some of those “right kind of nerds” he knew at university as members.
  • Monty Python’s “fish-slapping dance” sketch starring John Cleese and Michael Palin was originally produced as part of the 1971 pan-European May Day special Euroshow 71 before showing up in the following year’s series of Monty Python’s Flying Circus. The sketch only lasts for 20 seconds, but is cited by Michael Palin as one of his proudest moments; the story goes that the lock next to where they were performing was drained in between rehearsals and shooting, so the drop into the water was more than ten feet further than he was expecting!
  • Petunia Dursley is Harry Potter’s aunt in the Harry Potter books by J. K. Rowling. She later becomes a little more sympathetic, but in the first book, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (known in the US as Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone) she is described like this: “Mrs Dursley was thin and blonde and had nearly twice the usual amount of neck, which came in very useful as she spent so much of her time craning over garden fences, spying on the neighbours.”
  • A Nightmare on Elm Street is a hugely successful horror film franchise created by Wes Craven with the film of the same name in 1984. They feature dead child murderer Freddy Krueger (Robert Englund), who stalks and kills the teenagers of Springwood, Ohio through their dreams, particularly targeting Nancy Thompson, who lives on Elm Street. He returns in five sequels; in the last, Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare (1991), he starts killing in a new town, claiming that “Every town has an Elm Street!” (It is a pretty common street name in the US.) The franchise also spawned an anthology horror TV series, Freddy’s Nightmares; Wes Craven’s New Nightmare (1994) in which Freddy invades the real world; a 2010 remake of the original film; and Freddy vs Jason (2006), in which Freddy fights with Jason Vorhees from the Friday the 13th series of horror films.
  • At the end of the tenth season of the modern Doctor Who, the Twelfth Doctor, played by Peter Capaldi, regenerated into the Thirteenth Doctor, played by Jodie Whittaker – the first woman to (officially) play the role in the show’s 55 year history. Among conservative and sexist fans there was much wailing and gnashing of teeth, despite it being a change the show had been laying groundwork for many years.
  • Most vertebrate animals have a spleen, and as well as being the elephant graveyard for blood (thanks Liz), it also synthesises antibodies and stores a reserve of monocytes, the largest kind of white blood cell, both of which are very important to the immune system. The “red pulp” of the spleen, where the monocytes are stored, is also known as “the cords of Billroth”, a name Ben has immediately stolen for his Dungeons & Dragons campaign.
  • The “squiggly spooge” is an organ possessed by Irkan aliens, including the title character of classic Nickelodeon animated series Invader Zim, created by Jhonen Vasquez. It’s since passed into the online lexicon where it is used as a placeholder word for any unknown organ.
  • There were indeed two versions of the original Street Fighter arcade game, and one had large rubber punch and kick buttons which responded to how hard to whacked them. You can find out more about the forgotten precursor to Street Fighter II in this Kotaku article from 2011.
  • In the UK, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and several other former British colonies, Boxing Day is a public holiday celebrated the day after Christmas. There are few modern traditions attached to it, though in Australia at least it is the day many Summer blockbuster films are released.
  • We struggled to find a good source for Romans making roads out of garbage, but one of our favourite podcasts, 99% Invisible, have done stories about the making of new streets above the old in Seattle (and in a similar story, the creation of new land in the early history of San Francisco).
  • In Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill: Volume 2 (2004), Uma Thurman’s protagonist “The Bride” is buried alive in a coffin, but uses elite martial arts techniques to break open the coffin and dig her way to the surface.
  • Repo Man (1984) is a cult sci-fi comedy film written and directed by Adam Cox and starring Emilio Estevez and Harry Dean Stanton. Estevez plays a punk who takes a job working with Stanton as a repossession agent, and they go looking for a car which may have been involved in extraterrestrial activity. Pratchett confirmed in interviews that Reaper Man was a deliberate pun on the film’s title.
  • “Rocket Man” is a 1972 single by Elton John with lyrics by Bernie Taupin, which appeared on the album Honky Château. It features the line “I miss the Earth so much, I miss my wife; it’s lonely out in space”. It was famously covered in 1991 by Kate Bush for the tribute album Two Rooms: The Songs of Elton John & Bernie Taupin.
  • Professor Filius Flitwick is the part-goblin Charms Master and Head of Ravenclaw House at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. (In the world of Harry Potter, that is, he’s sadly not real.) On screen he is played by Warwick Davis of Star Wars and Willow fame, albeit with a radical change in look between the earlier and later films.
  • When Ben talks about “shot matching“, he means the cinematic technique known as the match cut, in which the end of one scene is visually or thematically matched with the beginning of the next. Two of the most famous examples are the opening of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), which visually matches a bone thrown into the air with a similarly shaped satellite, and this cut from David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia (1962), which uses vision and audio to thematically match Lawrence blowing out his match with the silent desert at dawn. The Lawrence cut was the work of English film editor Anne V Coates, recognised as one of the all-time greats; her assistant on Lawrence, Ray Lovejoy, was the editor for 2001.
  • Blink is the tenth episode of the third series of the modern Doctor Who, in which Steven Moffat introduced the spooky “Weeping Angels” – creatures who look like statues and can’t move while being looked at. Blink, and they move lightning fast. The final shots of real statues all around London – suggesting to young impressionable viewers that the Angels might be lurking around every corner – caused an epidemic of nightmares.
  • Police Constable Reg Hollis, played by Scottish actor Jeff Stewart, appeared in almost the entire 26-year run of ITV’s cops on the beat soap opera, The Bill. A fan of model trains and gardening who always had something to complain about in his softly-spoken, slightly boring way, Reg was nevertheless a dependable copper, though treated very poorly by most of his fellow officers. He resigned from the force in 2008, two years before the series ended, making Stewart the longest serving original cast member.
  • There is indeed a podcast about The Bill, aptly named The Bill Podcast. It’s only been around since 2017, but consists of monthly in-depth interviews with members of the cast. You can find The Bill Podcast on SoundCloud, iTunes and Facebook.
  • Keeping Up Appearances was a BBC One sit-com which ran from 1990 to 1995. It followed the farcical adventures of Hyacinth Bucket (Patricia Routledge) in her efforts to hide her lower-class origins – especially her family members – and exaggerate her accent, wealth and abilities to gain favour with those she perceives as her social superiors. Her long-suffering husband Richard Bucket was played by Clive Swift, whose family name of “Bucket” Hyacinth insists on pronouncing “Bouquet”.
  • We’d like to give a shout-out to longtime listener and friend of the show Sally Evans, whose tweet sadly arrived too late for us to mention it in the episode:
  • Meet Joe Black (1998), loosely based on the film Death Takes a Holiday (1934), stars Anthony Hopkins as a billionaire whom Death decides to visit because of the impassioned speech he gives his daughter (Claire Forlani) when it becomes clear she’s not all that keen on the man she’s about to marry. Father and daughter, by the way, are named Bill and Susan! The Brad Pitt body Death decides to inhabit rather inconsiderately belongs to a man with whom Susan was flirting, moments before he was violently hit and killed by two cars.
  • By contrast, Mighty Joe Young (1998), a remake of Mighty Joe Young (1939), stars Charlize Theron as a woman who has raised the titular gorilla, both of whom were orphaned by the same poacher when they were young. Joe is no longer accepted by others of his kind, probably because he is inexplicably three times the normal size for a gorilla. The plot revolves around Theron and Bill Paxton trying to protect Joe from the poacher who wants revenge as Joe bit off two of his hands in their original encounter. It’s…well, it’s no Meet Joe Black, that’s for sure.
  • The episode of 99% Invisible about the history of shopping malls is “The Gruen Effect“. While looking up the link for that one, we also found this great article about the birth of the shopping trolley: “Shopping Around: How Folding Basket Carriers Became Modern Nesting Carts“.
  • Ben mixes up his Sylvester Stallone characters during the discussion of the Dean; the one who ties a strip of cloth around his forehead is not Rocky Balboa from Rocky (1976) and its many sequels, but John Rambo, from First Blood (1982) and its sequels.
  • In Bill and Ted’s Bogus Journey (1991), the suprisingly non-bogus sequel to the surprisingly excellent time travel slacker comedy Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure (1989), teenage rocker wannabes and future saviours of the world Bill S. Preston esq. (Alex Winter) and Ted “Theodore” Logan (Keanu Reeves) are killed by future despot Chuck D Nomolos (Joss Ackland) before they can fulfil their destiny. They first “Melvin” Death and end up in Hell, but then challenge Death, beating him in games of Clue, Twister and Battleship until he finally agrees to help them return to life, eventually joining their band Wyld Stallyns as a bass player (shades of Soul Music there!). Joss Ackland later played Mustrum Ridcully in the TV adaptation of Hogfather, and reportedly regretted appearing in Bogus Journey, claiming he only did so because he was a workaholic. One more Bogus Journey connection with this novel: both feature characters named Rufus who are significant to the protagonist’s backstory and future!
  • ZZ Top play the “band at the party” in Back to the Future Part III (1990), performing a “hillbilly version” of their song “Doubleback” from their 1990 album Recycler. The version we remember is probably the orchestrated one played – repeatedly – during the town festival, and the album version plays over the credits. The music video uses footage from the film. While we may have forgotten the single, it was in fact a pretty big hit in the US at the time, reaching #1 in the rock charts for five weeks. 
  • Once and For All is currently on hiatus, but you can find all five released episodes at the link. Ben appears not only in episode five, “Death Vs Death”, but the very first episode, “Indiana O’Connell and The Kingdom of the Mummy’s Skull”, in which he goes to bat for Brendan Fraser’s character from The Mummy, Rick O’Connell, in a battle against Indiana Jones.
  • In the Sandman comics created by Neil Gaiman, Death is one of the Endless, seven beings who personify fundamental metaphysical concepts: Destiny, Death, Dream, Destruction, Desire, Delirium and Despair. While they are immortal in some circumstances they can die, though they are then replaced in their role by someone else. Dream is the titular Sandman of the original comics, but Death has also proven popular enough to have her own separate stories, notably Death: The High Cost of Living and Death: The Time of Your Life.
  • It should be noted that Azrael appears not just in Islamic lore, or The Smurfs, but in other Abrahamic traditions, including Hebrew mysticism, though he is rarely mentioned in Christian writing. The version of Azrael with millions of eyes is only one of many varying depictions.
  • You can see the full range of currently in print Collector’s Library editions of Discworld novels at the Discworld Emporium. We note that since our last visit, the Emporium now also stocks new printings of early editions of The Colour of Magic and The Light Fantastic…
  • You can see Paul Kidby’s “Lancre Gothic” in this BBC article collecting some of the best Discworld illustrations. Kidby’s “Death with Kitten II”, a newer version of the illustration from The Last Hero, can be found in the gallery on his web site and on his Instagram. “The Imaginarium of Professor Pratchett”, originally drawn for the cover of the “Discworld Imaginarium” book, is in Kidby’s online store, and you can also see Ben’s favourite version of this concept – from the cover of the HisWorld exhibition book – on Instragram. (You’ll need to get your hands on a copy of The Last Hero to check who A’Tuin is looking at.)
  • The Pratchett Armorial Bearings (the formal name for this kind of heraldry), which can indeed be seen on Pratchett’s Wikipedia page, are formally described thus:
    Blazoned:
    Arms – Sable an ankh between four Roundels in saltire each issuing Argent.
    Crest – Upon a Helm with a Wreath Argent and Sable On Water Barry wavy Sable Argent and Sable an Owl affronty wings displayed and inverted Or supporting thereby two closed Books erect Gules.
    Motto – “noli timere messorem”
    The motto is rather more accurate Latin for “Don’t fear the Reaper” compared to Mort’s Latatian “non timetis messor”.

#Pratchat35 Notes and Errata

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These are the show notes and errata for episode 35, “Great Balls of Physics“, featuring guest Anna Ahveninen, discussing Terry’s 1999 collaboration with Jack Cohen and Ian Stewart, The Science of Discworld.

  • The episode title plays on the classic Jerry Lee Lewis song, “Great Balls of Fire”, in honour of Roundworld’s tendency to shape matter into spheres.
  • Anna (and Liz and Ben) know that pharmacists do not just “sell molecules”. Modern pharmacy is the science of understanding and preparing medicines. Pharmacists are highly trained healthcare professionals, rightly held in high regard. But in “Commonwealth English”, “chemist” is a common synonym for pharmacist, hence Anna’s joke and our hyperbolic extension of it. (While we’re on the subject, it’s not entirely true that “everything” is made of molecules, but certainly everything that humans are likely to sell on Earth is.)
  • The story of the science fiction convention, which was held in the Hague in an unspecified year, appears in the book in Chapter 22, “Things That Aren’t”. Jack Cohen gave a longer account of Terry’s involvement, as well as some other background on how the book was written and published, in the Guardian article “Terry Pratchett and the real science of Discworld” by Sam Jordison, published a couple of months after Terry’s death.
  • A Teaspoon and an Open Mind: The Science of Doctor Who was written by Michael White in 2005, and if Ben were feeling uncharitable he might suggest it was rushed out to cash in- er, coincide with the hugely successful revived series that same year. White is an English author and former member of 80s band The Thompson Twins who now writes novels, but has also written a number of acclaimed biographies of da Vinci, Newton, Einstein, Tolkien, Asimov and many more. He also wrote The Science of The X-Files – which gets mentioned in the introduction of The Science of Discworld! The Doctor Who book’s title comes from the 1979 story The Creature From the Pit, in which the Doctor, having succeeded where another has failed, quips: “Well to be fair I had a couple of gadgets he probably didn’t, like a teaspoon and an open mind.” This line was almost certainly influenced by Douglas Adams, who was script editor of Doctor Who at the time. A Teaspoon and an Open Mind is also the title of the dedicated Doctor Who fan fiction site whofic.com.
  • Paul Davies is a famous English physicist and broadcaster who has written thirty books, most of them popular science titles which were bestsellers in the 1980s and 1990s. His most famous books are God and the New Physics (1983), The Mind of God (1992), and Ben’s favourite, How to Build a Time Machine (2002). Though less prolific in recent years, he did publish a new book in 2019: The Demon in the Machine.
  • Back to the Future Part II and Part III were filmed “back to back”, meaning that they were produced together, one immediately after the other. This allowed the two to make numerous references to each other and include many of the same actors.
  • In the 2007 Doctor Who story “Blink”, often cited as one of the best, the Tenth Doctor famously explains causality and time travel like this: “People assume that time is a strict progression of cause to effect, but, actually, from a non-linear, non-subjective viewpoint, it’s more like a big ball of wibbly-wobbly… timey-wimey… stuff.”
  • Jack Cohen was a zoologist with a long career in academia, and also advised science fiction authors how to write plausible aliens, including Anne McCaffrey, Harry Harrison, Larry Niven and Terry himself. He died in 2019. Ian Stewart is a mathematician who has written a large number of academic and popular mathematics books. Both worked at the University of Warwick, which granted Terry Pratchett his first honorary degree in 1999 following the publication of The Science of Discworld. (At the same ceremony, Terry made Jack and Ian honorary wizards of Unseen University.)
  • Orwell’s Revenge: The 1984 Palimpsest is a 1994 book by Peter Huber which tries to refute the dystopia of 1984, claiming that information technology will always be subverted for good because information wants to be free. Ben was skeptical when he first read it twenty-four years ago, and is no less skeptical now he’s discovered it was one of Mark Zuckerberg’s picks for his public book club in 2015.
  • Thaumaturgy comes from Greek, and means “miracle work” or “wonder work”. It is not only used to describe magic, but also the ability of some saints to perform miracles. In the roleplaying game Vampire: The Masquerade, the vampire clan Tremere are descended from a cabal of human mages who transformed themselves into vampires to achieve immortality, but lost their ability to use wizard magic. They developed a type of blood magic based on hermetic principles as a replacement, which they call thaumaturgy. (Ben’s pronunciation is correct.)
  • The Manhattan Project was the US Army’s effort to build nuclear weapons during World War II. As part of the project, the world’s first nuclear reactor, Chicago Pile-1, was built in an old squash court in Stagg Field, a football field and sports complex at the Hyde Park campus of the University of Chicago. It was completed on December 1, 1942, and the reaction started with removal of the control rods the next day.
  • Ben’s old saying about specialists is one that’s evolved a lot over time and likely has multiple origins, as so many of these things do. The earliest example seems to be from William Warde Fowler, a scholar at the University of Oxford, who used a shorter version of the phrase in a review published in 1911. The earliest version to add the bit about “knowing everything about nothing” also included the saying’s witty opposite, from Stanford University’s Robert E. Swain, appropriately enough a chemist, in 1928. He was talking about the difference between scientists and philosophers: “Some people regard the former as one who knows a great deal about a very little, and who keeps on knowing more and more about less and less until he knows everything about nothing. Then he is a scientist. Then there are the latter specimen, who knows a little about very much, and he continues to know less and less about more and more until he knows nothing about everything. Then he is a philosopher.”
  • A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes is Stephen Hawking’s bestselling popular science book, first published in 1988. Special and general relativity are covered in chapter two, which might challenge a few readers, but chapter four – while less than twenty pages long – introduces mind-bending ideas from quantum mechanics like the “spin” of quarks. Because it sold 25 million copies but contains such difficult concepts, it is often called “the most unread book of all time”. (There’s no shame in this; have another go if you like!) In 2014, American mathematician Jordan Ellenberg used publicly available data on Amazon Kindle highlighting to judge which books were abandoned partway through, a measure he cheekily called the “Hawking Index”. A Brief History of Time appeared as the third or fourth in the list.
  • What Does a Martian Look Like? The Science of Extraterrestrial Life was originally published as Evolving the Alien: The Science of Extraterrestrial Life in 2002. Its central thesis is that if we want to find life elsewhere in the universe, we need to broaden our understanding of the forms life might take, as our current searches only look for life similar to that found on Earth. “Jack&Ian” appears in the preface as the name of their “collective entity”, though it should be noted that the book is largely based on Jack’s often given lecture “The Possibility of Life on Other Planets”, or POLOOP, which he had originally wanted to call “What Does a Martian Look Like?”
  • It is generally acceptable to reference your own work in science academia…though since the frequency with which a researcher’s work is cited is a mark of respectability and influence, there have been those who perhaps do so too often…
  • We’ve mentioned Arthur C Clarke, famous author of 2001: A Space Odyssey and many other influential science fiction novels before. Clarke’s most famous quote, “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic“, was the last of his “three laws”, added to a revised version of his 1962 essay “Hazards of Prophecy: the Failure of the Imagination” in 1973. (The other two are much less famous.) The converse law quoted in the front of the book, “any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced“, is attributed in the first edition of The Science of Discworld to Gregory Benford – but while a version of it does appear in Benford’s 1997 book Foundation’s Fear, the original appears to have been written by Professor Barry Gehm, published in the science fiction magazine Analog as “Gehm’s Corollary to Clarke’s Third Law” in 1991.
  • The story from The Simpsons in which Bart messes up Lisa’s science project, creating a miniature world full of tiny people in a bathtub, is the segment “The Genesis Tub” from the Halloween special “Treehouse of Horror VII” in 1996.
  • We previously referred to the universes hidden inside things in the first two Men in Black films in our Truckers episode, “Upscalator to Heaven“. In the first film, aliens play with a marble which somehow contains the Milky Way galaxy, while in the sequel, our entire universe is shown to exist within a locker in an alien train station.
  • A microcosm is any subset of a thing which is said to represent the whole. Ben’s wordplay “microcosmos” isn’t that clever, since the word comes via Latin from the Greek mikros kosmos, which literally means “tiny cosmos”.
  • Ben used out of old habit he is trying to break the older LGBT acronym, which is now considered incomplete. The longer version preferred these days is LGBTIAQ+, which encompasses lesbian, gay, bi, trans, intersex, asexual and/or agender, queer and more identities. The intent of the acronym is to represent the diversity of experience outside of “traditional” binary gender and heterosexuality. While not everyone likes it or identifies with the term, “queer” is commonly used as spoken shorthand for the acronym.
  • The first clear fossil evidence of dinosaur feathers was found in the 1990s, and palaeontologists have only found more since then.
  • The luminiferous æther – not to be confused with the class of organic compounds called ether – was a proposed “medium” of some kind of matter that filled space, and explained the transmission of light waves. In 1887, scientists Albert A. Michelson (who made some of the early precise measurements of the speed of light) and Edward W. Morley (famous for measuring the precise atomic weight of oxygen) conducted an experiment to detect the motion of the Earth through the æther. It failed, leading to the end of æther theory, and paving the way for others, including Einstein’s special relativity.
  • There are currently 118 chemical elements that have been identified. New elements are acknowledged by a Joint Working Party formed in 1999 by the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC) and the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics (IUPAP). It can take years between the first experimental discovery and formal acceptance of a new element, as initial claims are often disputed. The most recent four were acknowledged in 2015 and officially named in 2016, but were first synthesised years earlier. In order of their first recognised synthesis, they are:
    • Oganesson (Og, atomic number 118, named after Russian physicist Yuri Oganessian) in 2002;
    • Moscovium (Mc, atomic number 115, named after Moscow) in 2003;
    • Nihonium (Nh, atomic number 113; named after Japan, Nihon) in 2004; and
    • Tennessine (Ts, atomic number 117, named after the US state of Tennessee) in 2009.
  • Plumbum is the Latin name for lead, which is why its chemical symbol is Pb. (This also helps distinguish it from the five other elements with names that begin with L.)
  • The idea that science works by disproving things was popularised by philosopher Karl Popper as falsifiability or falsificationism. Popper claimed that science worked not by looking at evidence in the world and using that to formulate laws, but by formulating laws and then testing them against reality, trying to prove them false. As Liz says, this is a lie-to-children – or at least a step in the development of the philosophy of science.
  • Pluto’s status had been in question since 1992, when several other similarly-sized objects were discovered in the Kuiper belt. In 2005 a bigger object, Eris, was discovered, and so in 2006 the International Astronomical Union decided to formally define what a planet was. As a result they also created the classification of “dwarf planet”, which they applied to Eris, Pluto and several other Kuiper Belt Objects.
  • Winter in Game of Thrones, like Summer, lasts a long but variable time – sometimes many “years”. (How they even have “years” of standard length when the seasons are like this is unclear.) Despite fan attempts to devise solar system models that might explain this, George R R Martin – author of the A Song of Ice and Fire novels on which the show is based – is on record saying there is a non-scientific explanation for the seasons that will be revealed by the time he finishes writing the series.
  • The term “virtual reality” had become popular by the 1980s, and the first publicly available VR arcade games and consoles as early as the mid-90s, but the technology didn’t really take off while computer graphics were incapable of producing realistic looking worlds. Affordable VR headsets and kits became viable in 2010 with the invention of the Oculus Rift, and there are now several different commercially available VR systems, the most popular being Playstation VR, released in 2016 by Sony.
  • The Lawnmower Man is a 1992 film very much not based on the short story of the same title by Stephen King, who sued the production company to have his name removed from posters even though they did own the film rights to the story. In the film, Pierce Brosnan plays a scientist who uses experimental drugs and VR technology to improve the intelligence of Jobe, an intellectually disabled man who works mowing lawns. Jobe becomes malevolent and “uploads” himself into “cyberspace”. It’s…look, it’s very 1990s.
  • The Last of Us is a 2013 videogame for the Playstation 4 set in a dystopian future America where humans and many other animals have been taken over by a mutated version of the Cordyceps fungus. Cordyceps is a real genus, though the famous example which infects ants and alters their behaviour is now reclassified as Ophiocordyceps unilateralis. The fungus causes ants to climb to the underside of leaf and grab on tight, where it dies. The fungus replaces its body tissues and grows a fruiting body out of its head to spread its spores, and what’s more it’s been doing this to poor little ants for around 50 million years or more.
  • The Andalite Chronincles are better known as Animorphs, which we’ve previously talked about in #Pratchat19, “It Don’t Mean a Thing if it Ain’t Got Rocks In“. The Yeerks are small parasitic aliens, and mortal enemies of the animorphs, teenagers given shapeshifting powers in order to fight back against the Yeerk invasion.
  • Jack&Ian coined the term “extelligence” in their first book together, Figments of Reality: the Evolution of the Curious Mind in 1997. They define it in the introduction as “the accumulating knowledge of generations of intelligent beings” and consider it “a thing or process with its own characteristic structure and behaviour” requiring a new name. The book is largely devoted to exploring it. While it’s not as clear in The Science of Discworld, both Figments of Reality and What Does a Martian Look Like? explicitly include cultural knowledge like folklore and other non-written forms of knowledge as part of extelligence.
  • SimEarth was originally released in 1990, and was the second game in the “Sim” series following SimCity. (The third was SimAnt, in 1991.) It wasn’t just based on James Lovelock’s work; he directly advised on the game and wrote an introduction for the manual. As well as intelligent dinosaurs, it was possible to have machine life (assuming an advanced civilisation blew themselves up), intelligent carnivorous plants, and yes, a crustacean civilisation could totally be a thing.
  • The short story collection about women associated with the Nobel Prize is Ordinary Matter by Australian writer Laura Elvery, published in September 2020 by University of Queensland Press.
  • If you’re interested in a perspective on sexism in the Nobel Prize (along with other biases), this article on Massive Science is a good starting point.
  • While we’re used to thinking about Discworld wizards as men and witches as women, there are exceptions. Eskarina Smith, the Disc’s first woman wizard, appears in Pratchett’s third Discworld novel Equal Rites, which we covered in #Pratchat25, “Eskist Attitudes“. Watch out for more on that front in future episodes. (No spoilers for books we’ve not covered yet!)
  • Mileva Marić was a Serbian physicist and mathematician. Her career in academia was interrupted by her relationship with Albert Einstein, who was her lover, husband and the father of her children. While she is not credited as a co-author on any of his work, there is evidence to suggest she may have substantially assisted Einstein in his early work, including the papers for which he won the Nobel Prize.
  • There are plenty of podcast episodes about the forgotten women of science, but so far we’ve not found a whole show about this. Let us know if you find one! Meanwhile some good feminist science podcasts are Lady Science and Superwomen in Science, while great more general science shows hosted by women are Ologies with Alie Ward and Talk Nerdy with Cara Santa Maria.
  • For books on women in science, Anna recommends Women in Science by Rachel Ignotofsky, Inferior by Angela Saini and Invisible Women by Caroline Criado Perez. You can also check out the books on the STEMMinist book club list. (As usual, we recommend sourcing them from a local independent book shop, who can order in anything you want and needs your custom more than Amazon or BookDepository.)
  • William of Ockham (1287 – 1347) was a friar, philosopher and theologian whose most famous contribution to what would become scientific thought was the idea that “entities should not be multiplied without necessity” – i.e. that an explanation that involves fewer things is more likely correct. This is known as the law of parsimony, or more famously, Occam’s Razor – hence the beard gag. (It should be noted that William himself used the idea to defend the idea of miracles.)
  • In most versions of The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, Arthur Dent and Ford Prefect end up on a space ark full of middle managers and other people claimed by their society to be the “useless” third, sent to crash into prehistoric Earth. On Earth, Arthur tries to communicate with the original inhabitants, the not-cave-people (they don’t live in caves), by teaching them to play Scrabble with tiles he makes himself. It doesn’t work. The Primary Phase of the radio series, the second book The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, and the original television series all end with Arthur and Ford trying to determine the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe and Everything by getting the not-cave-people to pull Scrabble letters out of a bag at random.
  • Ben thought about including all the cancelled space missions in these show notes, but decided to save that depressing list for the separate article he might write with updates on some of the science in the book.
  • Humans have rarely thought scientifically about the Flat Earth. It was clear to many ancient civilisations that the planet must be round, and the first written account of the spherical Earth was in about 250 BCE by Eratosthenes and other Greeks, using geometry to mathematically prove its shape and possibly accurately calculate its size. (Jack&Ian point out that the accuracy is based on modern estimates of the unit they used, the stadion, but they are maybe a little overly suspicious.)
  • Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions is a satirical 1884 novella by English schoolteacher Edwin A Abbott. As well as considering how two-dimensional beings might experience one- or three-dimensional worlds, it is also a fairly savage satire of the Victorian class system; the sexual politics of the book are either even more savage satire, or emblematic of the sexism of the time, depending on your interpretation. Ian Stewart not only wrote a sequel, Flatterland, in 2001, but an annotated version of the original, The Annotated Flatland, in 2002 (the same year as the updated The Science of Discworld and its sequel).
  • Mosasaurs are now well-known to the general public after appearing in a marine exhibit in the film Jurassic World, the 2015 sequel to the original three Jurassic Park films. Two different species of mosasaur were featured in the final episode of Impossible Pictures’ Sea Monsters, a 2003 follow up to 1999’s Walking with Dinosaurs.
  • Listener Bel described three categories of lies-to-children:
    • Protecting children e.g. “The world is a good and safe place”, stranger danger, “adults know what they’re doing”
    • Simplifications e.g. there are goodies and baddies and you can tell the difference by looking at them, “this is what an atom looks like”
    • Protecting adults, or “keeping the status quo”, e.g. sexism, racism, ableism, ageism and many more.
  • On being able to tell that a creature had hooves from its tooth, the specific instance Jack&Ian mention is of the Tingamarra tooth, which supposedly “demolished” the theory that placental mammals never made it to Australia. That call was a bit premature, since the claim is regarded at best as highly controversial and has not significantly changed the view of Australian palaeontology. It is still the consensus that the only placentals to arrive in Australia before humans were bats and rodents.
  • Temperance “Bones” Brennan is a fictional forensic anthropologist and protagonist of all twelve seasons of the television series Bones, which ran from 2005 to 2017. She’s played by Emily Deschanel. The television series is based on the Temperance Brennan series of novels by Kathy Reichs, which began with Déjà Dead in 1997 and, as of 2021, includes twenty novels and a short story collection. Ben is glad he missed this reference because while forensic anthropology is real – Reichs is one herself! – the show is pretty ridiculous. Bones has a hologram table! But it’s all good fun, and it gave David Boreanaz something to be cool and vulnerable in after Angel finished.
  • Teeth are great for palaeontologists because their enamel allows them to be preserved, and their shape and patterns of wear can be used to determine a great deal about diet and behaviour. Teeth are also very distinctive, and so you can tell a hooved animal’s tooth from that of an elephant or similar.
  • Liz’s joke about a creature with “don” in its name being really into “ham” is a reference to popular Australian ham, bacon and smallgoods brand Don. They are famous for their slogan “Is Don. Is good.”, coined for a series of ads in which a man spruiks their products in slightly broken, accented English before concluding with the phrase. (The same actor also plays the owner of a Gogomobil in another famous Australian ad from 1992 for the Yellow Pages phone directory. We have a lot of famous ads, probably because most of our television is otherwise sourced from the US or the UK; ad breaks were some of the rare times when you’d see Australian actors and sometimes hear Australian accents.)
  • To answer Liz’s questions: Are beak just giant tooth? No. Beak are is hair? …also no, but closer. Beaks are made of keratin, which is the same protein from which hair is formed. But there are two kinds of keratin: alpha-keratin is found in all vertebrates, and is used to form hair, wool and other softer but tough materials, like the outer layers of bony horns; and beta-keratin, found only in reptiles and birds, which is used to make scales, claws, feathers, shells and beaks.
  • Evolutionary electronics – also known as evolvable hardware – is totally a real thing, as is the circuit described in the book, evolved by Adrian Thompson at the University of Sussex in 1996. Though it hasn’t led to anything groundbreaking, the same principles can be used to make adaptive hardware that can alter itself in response to changes in the environment.
  • A blimp is an inflatable airship that doesn’t have any internal structure – basically a big shaped balloon held in shape by internal pressure. “Zeppelin” is the common name for rigid airships, in which the body is supported by an internal structure. Zeppelin was the name of the German aircraft manufacturer which built many of the most famous airships, including the Hindenburg. The company vanished for around fifty years following World War II, but was revived in 2001 and still operates today – including working with Goodyear to replace their older blimps with semi-rigid airships. These have a supporting keel along the base of the envelope that holds the lifting gas, but no other internal structure.

#Pratchat57West5 Notes and Errata

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These are the episode notes and errata for bonus Pratchat episode 57 West 5, “Daniel Superbaboon“, discussing the 1986 short story “The High Meggas“.

Notes and Errata

  • The episode title is…well, if you’ve read the story, you get it. Ben would share his draft title idea, but he’s actually pretty sure it will work even better for The Long Mars, so we’ll wait until that episode comes out.
  • Our previous Long Earth episodes are #Pratchat31, “It’s Just a Step to the West“, and #Pratchat46, “The Helen Green Preservation Society”. We talk about The Long Mars in #Pratchat57, “Get Your Dad to Mars!”
  • “The High Meggas” was first published in 2012 – but A Blink of the Screen wasn’t actually its first appearance! The Long Earth was published four months earlier, and one of the first editions – specifically the “Iron Edition” with a metallic cover, produced in an edition of 8,000, mostly for Waterstones – included the short story at the end, along with an author’s note which seems to match the one in A Blink of the Screen. Interestingly, Colin Smythe’s website suggests that the story was written “in late 1985 or early 1986 after completing Equal Rites“, which contradicts Pratchett’s introduction, which places it in between The Colour of Magic and The Light Fantastic. Either timeline works, though The Colour of Magic would have been sent to Colin Smythe years before 1985, since it was published in 1983. This could mean Smythe is right, and the story was actually written between The Light Fantastic (published in June 1986) and Equal Rites (published in January 1987, and so written in 1986). But if Pratchett’s recollection is correct, it’s possible he was just doodling with these ideas for years – which certainly makes sense given how developed the concepts are in “The High Meggas”.
  • “Hard science fiction“, as we explained in the notes for #Pratchat31, is “realistic” science fiction that tries to stick to established science, or plausible extensions of it.
  • The “fan on speed-dial” was David Langford, an editor and writer who became one of Pratchett’s close friends. He was one of the first people to review The Colour of Magic and The Light Fantastic in their first editions, both for White Dwarf magazine, and as a result was asked to give a reader review for the manuscript of Equal Rites by Gollancz. His feedback was well received, and he continued to provide notes at an early stage for each novel thereafter, eventually corresponding directly with Terry via letters and email. He wasn’t just on call to prevent the repetition of jokes, but also to act as part of a collective Discworld encyclopaedia (this was in the days before wikis, remember). This arrangement continued up to Thud! As well as a long list of non-fiction and short fiction, Langford write a novel that Pratchett loved, The Leaky Establishment, and edits the long-running and multiple Hugo Award-winning fanzine Ansible, which is still going today. (It’s named after a term for a long-distance communicator coined by Ursula Le Guin in her 1966 novel Rocannon’s World.) Dave also compiled the two Discworld quiz books, Unseen University Challenge and The Wyrdest Link. You can find out more about Dave and Ansible at ansible.uk.
  • Libertarianism – the philosophy or political position of libertarians – believes in maximum personal freedoms, usually (if we may editorialise) the detriment of society as a whole. It’s particularly popular in the United States, where it’s linked to some of the ideas behind the founding of the country and its split with the United Kingdom, but in practice it usually means a resistance to all forms of government intervention, both personally and in the free market ideal of capitalism, and usually a strong distrust of authority. Its influence on the politics of America, and particularly the Republican Party, has been profound, especially over the last four decades or so.
  • Ron Swanson – played by the wonderful Nick Offerman – is a character in the American sitcom Parks and Recreation (2009-2015). Swanson is the Director of the Parks and Recreation Department of Pawnee, Illinois, but despite his senior role in local government is a staunch libertarian who tries to reduce his department’s activity as much as possible. (He’s a big softie at heart, though, which is why we love him.)
  • The “double-tap” rule is the idea in fiction that competent killers always make sure their target is dead, usually by shooting them twice. It comes from the military term “double-tap”, which means to shoot twice in rapid succession – a technique introduced in the 1930s to overcome limitations of full-metal jacketed ammunition. (We’d rather not go into any more detail about the history of making sure guns can kill people, but if you’ve the stomach for it some of the details are quite interesting.)
  • We filmed a special video discussion of The Carpet People for the Australian Discworld Convention, which was played as part of their Virtual Discworld Fun Day on 18 June, 2022. It’ll be released publicly soon, and we’ll link to it when you can watch it. Because it’s a discussion of the differences between the two versions of the book, and we show off the illustrations in the original, we don’t plan to release it as an audio-only episode of the podcast. Subscribers and one-off supporters already have access to a special annotated version of the video on Ko-Fi titled “A Tale of Two Carpets”. You’ll need to be a Ko-Fi donor or member to access it, and to log in. (See the Support Us page for more about how that works.)
  • Terry’s early short stories for children have been published in four volumes: Dragons at Crumbling Castle (2014), The Witch’s Vacuum Cleaner (2016), Father Christmas’s Fake Beard (2017) and The Time-Travelling Caveman (2020). These are collected from those he wrote for the Bucks Free Press between 1965 and 1973 (so between the ages of 17 and 25, skewing towards the younger end), though the third volume contains some later Christmas-themed stories as well. In his introduction to Dragons at Crumbling Castle, the only volume published before his death, Pratchett says the stories are “mostly as they were first printed”, with just “the odd tweak here, a pinch there, and a little note at the bottom where needed, and all because the younger me wasn’t as clever back then as he turned out to be.”
  • Ben couldn’t find the quote he mentions about the difference between fantasy and science fiction. Pratchett has certainly had much to say about both, but he doesn’t make such a clear distinction between the two; he’s said both that science fiction is a modern sub-set of fantasy, and something to the effect that science fiction is fantasy with bolts painted on the outside. There are multiple versions of that last one, but Ben couldn’t find a source, so treat it with a grain of salt, even if it’s definitely the sort of thing Pratchett would say.
  • The Expanse is a series of nine novels (and associated shorter fiction) beginning with 2011’s Leviathan Wakes. The books are written by “James S. A. Corey”, a pseudonym for writers Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck, who came up with the idea initially as a setting for a roleplaying game. The story takes place in a realistic 24th century future in which humans have colonised Mars and parts of the asteroid belt, and combines hard sci-fi, inter-planetary politics and class warfare with more fantastic sci-fi ideas. It was adapted for television over seven seasons between 2015 and 2022, first by SyFy, then Amazon Prime for seasons four through seven.
  • Liz’s specialist subjects have been brought up by her on the podcast before:
    • Queen Victoria Markets and (to a lesser extent) the Melbourne General Cemetery were both mentioned in #Pratchat34, “Only You Can Save Deadkind“
    • We just recently talked about magician Will Alma in #Pratchat54, “The Land Before Vimes“
  • We discussed “#ifdefDEBUG + ‘world/enough’ + ‘time'”, Pratchett’s 1990 story about machine-created artificial realities, in #Pratchat56, “do { Podcast(); } while (unreadPratchetts > 0);“.
  • In The Long Earth, the asteroid, comet or whatever it is that destroys the Earth of the Gap doesn’t yet have a name. It’s christened “Bellos” by the nerds at GapSpace, as we learn in Chapter 31 of The Long War, after the rogue planet in the 1951 film When Worlds Collide.
  • We did indeed discuss fuel weight and other considerations of air travel, especially on Concorde, in our episode about Wings, the third and final book in Pratchett’s Bromeliad trilogy. That was in #Pratchat20, “The Thing Beneath My Wings“.
  • Roger Moore was the third actor to play James Bond in the official series of films from Eon Productions, taking on the role in seven films between 1973 and 1985. “The High Meggas”, assuming it was written in 1986 (see the third note at the top of this page), was actually written in between Moore’s final Bond film and the first of his predecessor, and Ben favourite, Timothy Dalton. It’s also worth noting that while this story certainly does delve into “real Bond areas”, the stock character of the femme fatale is much older.
  • Robinson Crusoe is the titular protagonist of Daniel Defoe’s 1719 novel, The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, of York, Mariner: Who lived Eight and Twenty Years, all alone in an un-inhabited Island on the Coast of America, near the Mouth of the Great River of Oroonoque; Having been cast on Shore by Shipwreck, wherein all the Men perished but himself. With An Account how he was at last as strangely deliver’d by Pyrates. Written by Himself. Standards for titles have changed a lot in three hundred years.
  • “Manumission” is an obscure word these days; it’s a term for a slave owner freeing their slaves. Modern descriptions of such acts would more likely use the less specific terms “enfranchisement” or “emancipation”.
  • A quick guide to the other references we mention in passing:
    • Marion Robert Morrison (1907-1979), better known by his screen name John Wayne, was an American actor best known for playing heroes in Western and war films during the Golden Age of Hollywood. He was also an outspoken conservative and supporter of the Republican Party, and held some pretty horrendously racist views.
    • Captain Nemo is the captain of the Nautilus, the mystery submarine in Jules Verne’s novel Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. We previously talked about that book in #Pratchat27 and #Pratchat31, and about its sequel, The Mysterious Island, in #Pratchat45.
    • Daniel Boone (1734-1820) was a real person – a pioneer who founded European settlements in Kentucky. He published an account of his “adventures” in 1784 and became a folk hero during his own lifetime. He’s been idolised (and idealised) ever since, notably in a popular American television series that ran from 1964 to 1970 and was also broadcast in Australia.
  • While it does seem like a modern idea, even in 1986 proxy wars and secretly state-funded militias were a familiar feature of the Cold War (and go much further back in history). The Soviet-Afghan War ran from 1979 to 1989, and provided an excuse for America and other countries to supply funds and arms for Mujahideen insurgent groups to use fighting the Russian-backed Democratic Republic of Afghanistan. After the fall of the Soviet Union, their forces left Afghanistan, and a few years later the country’s government was toppled and the Taliban took over.
  • Liz loves to mention The Shawshank Redemption – it’s probably her most “left ear” conversation topic! Previous mentions include #Pratchat14, #Pratchat28, #Pratchat38, #Pratchat47 and #Pratchat53.
  • How to Host a Murder is the most famous brand of murder mystery party game. The series was first published by Decipher Inc between 1983 and 2003. They were hugely popular for a decade or so, with around two dozen published, including ones themed for teenagers and children, and even one set in the world of Star Trek: The Next Generation. Players take on the roles of guests at a dinner or other party where a murder (or sometimes another crime) has been committed, and every one of them is a suspect. Over several rounds (and between courses; it’s designed to played over dinner), players are guided by an audio recording and individual booklets, which give them secret information about themselves and other guests. Through conversation they are meant to reveal some of this information, gradually gathering enough clues together to try and work out who committed the murder. (No-one – not even the murderer – knows who did it until the end.) The series is pretty light-hearted, and often silly, with lots of puns, corny jokes, over the top characters and outlandish themes. If you’re thinking of picking one up (and they show up often in charity shops, since you can’t play the same one twice), note that some – especially the earlier ones – also feature plenty of lazy racist and sexist tropes that wouldn’t fly today.

More notes coming soon!

Thanks for reading our notes! If we missed anything, or you have questions, please let us know.

#Pratchat59 Notes and Errata

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These are the episode notes and errata for Pratchat episode 59, “Charlie and the Whale Factory“, discussing Pratchett’s 2005 collaboration with Ian Stewart and Jack Cohen, The Science of Discworld III: Darwin’s Watch.

Iconographic Evidence

Feast your eyes on this video of Kat’s extraordinary Pratchett shelf!

Notes and Errata

  • The episode title is of course inspired by Roald Dahl’s 1964 children’s novel Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, in which young Charlie Bucket manages to find a “golden ticket” admiring him to the magical factory of weird chocolatier Willy Wonka. We’re not entirely sure if Charlie Darwin would rather have encountered the oddities of Wonka’s factory, but he certainly didn’t seem to have enjoyed seeing the God of Evolution’s whale production line… The book was memorably filmed in 1971 as Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, with Gene Wilder playing the part of Wonka, though Dahl did not like it. It was a modest success at the time, but became a cult classic in the 1980s when it was frequently broadcast on television. A 2005 adaptation using the same title as the book was directed by Tim Burton and starred Johnny Depp as Wonka, but the less said about that the better.
  • We discussed The Science of Discworld II: The Globe in #Pratchat47, “A Finite Number of Shakespeares“, with guest Alanta Colley. We felt afterwards we hadn’t adequately expressed all of our feelings about it, so we discussed it a bit more in episode seven of our bonus subscriber only podcast, Ook Club, released in October 2021.
  • We’ve previously mentioned Richard Dawkins in #Pratchat29 and #Pratchat47. His early books on evolution are good, and The Blind Watchmaker, published in 1986, makes a great companion piece to Darwin’s Watch. But in the early 2000s he became more and more focused on being anti-religion, and in 2006, a year after The Science of Discworld III, he published The God Delusion, which argued that any belief in a god was delusional. It became his best selling work. He has continued to attract controversy over the years, thanks to his large audience and his perceived position (until fairly recently) as a representative for atheists, whether they want him or not. He’s made enough problematic statements that there’s an entire Wikipedia article titled “Views of Richard Dawkins“.
  • Redshift is an increase in the wavelength of electromagnetic radiation, including visible light, that occurs when observing objects which are moving away from us – making the light from very fast moving objects over large distances appear redder than it truly is. This is mostly observed with the light from distant stars as the universe expands. It can happen in the opposite direction too, with the wavelengths getting shorter, which is known as blueshift. Kat mentions Terry’s use of it in Thief of Time; she also mentioned that it appears in Thud! but we cut that as we didn’t want to spoil a book we’ll be covering very soon.
  • You can get a good overview of Monopoly‘s history as The Landlord’s Game via episode 189 of the 99% Invisible podcast, “The Landlord’s Game“. In recent years there’s been renewed interest in Elizabeth Magie’s original 1904 game, which tried to popularise Georgism, an alternate form of land tax. You can find out way more about it at landlords-game.com. Meanwhile, if you still think the modern game is fair, check out this monopolynerd.com blog post from 2012 which breaks down the probability of getting a full set of properties through luck (i.e. landing on them and buying them, without having to trade with other players), based on turn order.
  • I’m You, Dickhead is officially available for free here on YouTube. Note that it really lives up to the title; there’s swearing and the protagonist truly is a dickhead.
  • Bees and wasps (and ants) are members of the order Hymenoptera, a group of insects that includes more than 150,000 species. Spider wasps, the parasitic wasps which prey on spiders, are in the family Pompilidae; there are around 5,000 species of them, most of which specialise in specific kinds of spider.
  • The telephone is usually attributed to Alexander Graham Bell, who was the first American to be granted a patent for the device in February 1876. But even at the time this was controversial; rival inventor Elisha Gray also filed for a patent the same day, and Bell’s patent was suspended for three months so the matter could be settled – which it was, eventually, in Bell’s favour. But there are plenty of good reasons to think this wasn’t entirely fair or just… (Ben didn’t mean to conflate this dispute with the War of the Currents, but they two conflicts have a very similar vibe.)
  • Elizabeth Fulhame was a chemist lived in Edinburgh in the late 18th century, though some details of her life are lost to history. The book from which Kat quotes is An Essay On Combustion with a View to a New Art of Dying and Painting, wherein the Phlogistic and Antiphlogistic Hypotheses are Proved Erroneous, which she published in 1794. Catalysis, which she describes in the book, is the now commonplace practice of speeding up a reaction between two chemicals by using a third substance, a catalyst, which isn’t affected by the reaction.
  • Kat is remembering The Science of Doctor Who, which did indeed star Brian Cox and was broadcast on BBC Two in November 2013 as part of the programme’s fiftieth anniversary celebrations… Which means Ben has it one the Blu-Ray box set he has of all those anniversary specials!
  • We’ve previously mentioned the cellulose billiard balls way back in #Pratchat1, “Boots Theory” (about Men at Arms), and #Pratchat10, “We’re Gonna Need a Bigger Broomstick“ (about Moving Pictures). The 99% Invisible episode about the invention of cellulose mentioned by Ben is The Post-Billiards Age from May 2015, which we also mentioned in both of those episodes.

More notes coming soon!

Thanks for reading our notes! If we missed anything, or you have questions, please let us know.

#Pratchat59 – Charlie and the Whale Factory

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Scientist, writer and editor Dr Kat Day joins Liz and Ben on a timey-wimey to Roundworld, as the wizards once again try to save humanity in Pratchett’s third collaboration with Ian Stewart and Jack Cohen: 2005’s The Science of Discworld III: Darwin’s Watch.

Roundworld – the impossibly non-magical universe in a bottle which runs on rules – has gone wrong again, and the wizards feel duty-bound to set it right. Humanity’s survival depends on the publication of a specific book, but something is trying very hard to make sure its author writes a different one…or gets eaten by a giant squid. With the fate of humanity hanging in the balance, the wizards go to war – but who is their hidden enemy? And why is there one beardy fellow too many in the Great Hall?

In the (short) fiction chapters, the wizards must once again travel into Roundworld history, this time with a clear mission: to get Charles Darwin onto the Beagle so he can write The Origin of Species. In the science chapters, Jack and Ian have a focus – the importance of the theory of evolution – but they also feel free to use the time travel plot to explain infinity, DNA, the nature of science and history, and much more besides. They’ve learned to stay away from the cutting edge – but have they come entirely out of the “philosopause” they didn’t seem to know they were in last time?

Does the plot rely too much on prior knowledge of the Discworld? Is that really a problem, given the nature of the book? Did you follow the explanations of Minkowski spacetime and the different kinds of infinity, or were you happy coasting across the science chapters? Do they completely miss the point in that last non-fiction chapter – and does it really matter, when the end of the fiction part is so satisfying? Join in the conversation using the hashtag #Pratchat59 on social media!

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Guest Dr Kat Day is a chemist, a former teacher, a medical editor and a writer of both science and fiction. Kat became well known via her chemistry blog The Chronicle Flask, which is currently on hiatus; you can also find her fiction at the fiction phial. Kat is also an assistant editor for Pseudopod, the horror fiction anthology podcast from Escape Artists. Kat recommended the story “Celestial Shores” as a possible entry point for Pratchett fans, as well as “Let the Buyer Beware” from Pseudopod’s sister podcast for young adult speculative fiction, Cast of Wonders. Over on Twitter you can follow Kat at @chronicleflask, and Pseudopod at @pseudopod_org.

As usual, you can find notes and errata for this episode on our web site.

Next episode Pratchett turns sixty! As promised back in #Pratchat30, we’re doing another all-questions episode. This is your chance to send in questions about books you missed first time round, pitch your wild Discworld theories, and ask us pretty much anything you like that doesn’t fit into the usual book-focussed episode. We’d also love you to answer our questions: what are do you enjoy most about the show? What kind of episodes do you wish we’d do? Which of our opinions have you most disagreed with? And have you learned anything from us? (Ben sure has!) Send us your answers, and questions, using the hashtag #Pratchat60, or via email to chat@pratchatpodcast.com.

Oh, and in November, get ready for a double-header: not only are we reading Thud! with educator Matt Roden for #Pratchat61, but we’re cooking up a bonus crossover episode! Yes, we’re teaming up with Jo and Francine from The Truth Shall Make Ye Fret, another great Pratchett podcast, to discuss Where’s My Cow?, the hottest children’s book in Ankh-Morpork. We thought we’d let you know a little early, since it might be tricky to track down a copy…

Want to make sure we get through every Pratchett book? You can support Pratchat for as little as $2 a month and get access to bonus stuff, including the exclusive supporter podcast Ook Club! Click here to find out more.

#Pratchat29 Notes and Errata

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These are the show notes and errata for episode 29, “Great Rimward Land“, featuring guest Fury, discussing the 1998 Discworld novel The Last Continent.

Iconographic Evidence

Feast your eyes on Fury’s glorious illustration of Trunkie!

Notes and Errata

  • This episode’s title puns on the Icehouse song “Great Southern Land“, a big hit in Australia which also featured on the soundtrack of Yahoo Serious’ 1988 Australian comedy film Young Einstein. In retrospect both the song and the film might have been expected to show up parodied in The Last Continent…
  • Our pre-show disclaimer uses the phrase “going off like a frog in a sock”. “Going off” on its own means to put a lot of energy or excitement into something, sometimes in anger, but in the frog idiom always in a fun way. Unusually for Australian slang, this isn’t ironic, just a straight-up metaphor; imagine you’ve caught a frog in a sock and it’s trying to get out, and you’ll get the idea. (And no, Australians don’t actually catch frogs in socks, this is strictly a thought experiment.)
  • The Kiwi-Aussie portmanteau is spelled “Kaussie“, whereas the slang for swimwear is “cossie“; it’s short for “swimming costume”.
  • The South Australian television personality who keeps getting in fights on the Internet is Cosi, host of South Aussie with Cosi, a travel show produced by Channel 9. (Not to be confused with Cosi, the play by Australian playwright Louis Nowra, previously discussed in #Pratchat23, “The Music of the Nitt“.)
  • “Swimming togs” comes from the British slang word “togs”, which just meant clothes. It’s one of a number of slang terms now archaic in the UK which have survived in some form in Australia.
  • Helen Zaltzmann is host of The Allusionist, a podcast about language, and one of Ben’s favourites. We’re sure she’d be the first to tell you that not every word – slang or otherwise – has a satisfying true origin story.
  • Stephen Briggs was a frequent collaborator with Terry, beginning with the original map of Ankh-Morpork. He also contributed to the diaries, The Discworld Companion and many other books outside the main novels. He adapted many of the books into plays, some of which have been published, and has read the audiobook versions of more than 30 of Terry’s novels. (Stephen Fry reads the UK editions of the Harry Potter audiobooks; if you’ve heard the US versions, those are read by Jim Dale.)
  • Mike Schur’s afterlife sitcom The Good Place set much of its third season in Australia, and copped much criticism from actual Australians for the quality of the accents. You couldn’t fault the jokes, though – or the punny names of the restaurants, shops and incidental characters in those episodes.
  • Pretty Little Liars is a teen mystery TV series based on the books by American YA author Sara Shepard. The UK accented character is antagonist Alex Drake, who shows up in season 7. We’d tell you more, but…spoilers.
  • The extreme Australian wizard slang originated in a reply to a tumblr post from about JK Rowling’s the introduction of the American term for muggle, “no-maj”; you can find the original here, but just in case it vanishes from Tumblr forever, we’ll immortalise the words of user edenwolfie here (and a quick warning – we haven’t censored the print version). We’d also like to point out that Australian wizards and witches would most likely spell it “muggo”.

I can just imagine the Australian word being some awful slang that’s derived from muggle, such as “mugo”.

Ah, I can imagine it now, wizards in thongs, drinking butter-VB yelling “You’re such a fucking mugo, you wandless cunt!”

edenwolfie, Tumblr, 11 November 2015
  • Minotaur is Melbourne’s biggest independent pop culture and science fiction bookstore. Many of Terry’s early Melbourne signings occurred at its original location on Bourke Street, but it moved to Elizabeth Street in 2000.
  • PhanCon ’98 was a one-off fan science fiction convention held in Sydney in 1998. Information on it is in short supply, but guests included Terry Pratchett and British fantasy author David Gemmell.
  • Comet Shoemaker-Levy-9 broke up in 1992 and smashed into the planet Jupiter in 1994, to much excitement (on Earth at least). It was named for astronomers Carolyn Shoemaker, Eugene M. Shoemaker and David Levy, who discovered it after it had been captured by Jupiter’s gravity into a decaying orbit.
  • English scientists did indeed doubt the reality of the platypus, which not only has a unique and wonderful anatomy, but is one of just two surviving monotremes – a group of mammals that lay eggs. (The other one is the echidna.) As well as its distinctive bill, it has sharp ankle spurs which in the male can inject venom, and the ability to sense electric fields as a way of locating prey.
  • The Dreaming is a sophisticated concept in the stories of Aboriginal cultures. It has a complex relationship to space and time, existing both long ago and now, but despite the name – which was coined by Europeans – it has nothing to do with dreaming. An older term, “dreamtime”, is generally no longer considered appropriate. We recommend reading up on the topic; one good place to start is this article at Common Ground.
  • Boomerangs bought in stores and thrown to return are, indeed, toys. Hunting and war boomerangs were generally much larger, sharpened, and often had one wing longer than the other.
  • The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert is a 1994 Australian comedy film which was a surprise box office hit often considered hugely significant in the history of queer cinema. It follows two drag queens (Hugo Weaving and Guy Pearce) and a trans woman (Terence Stamp) as they travel from Sydney through the outback to perform in Alice Springs. Though initially praised for its queer-positive message, the portrayal of Filipino character Cynthia attracted widespread criticism for relying on racist stereotypes of Asian women common in Australia. Original writer and director Stephan Elliott adapted the film into a stage musical, Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, in 2006; the musical retains the characters and plot more or less unchanged, but hasn’t been criticised nearly as much for the character of Cynthia.
  • The opal fossils gallery at the South Australian Museum is still there, and you can see the skeleton Ben mentioned. The web site is sketchy on details, so we can’t confirm if it’s an Elasmosaurus or another species of plesiosaur, but we still recommend you check it out yourself!
  • The protagonist wizard (or at least wizarding student) in Moving Pictures was Victor Tugelbend. Other wizards not part of the regular faculty include Drum Billet, Archchancellor Cutangle, Simon and Esk (Equal Rites); Igneous Cutwell (Mort); Alberto Malich (Mort and most other Death novels); and Ipslore the Red (Sourcery).
  • Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency is more-or-less a mashup of two of Douglas Adams’ Doctor Who scripts: the unfinished Shada, and City of Death, which contributed the storyline about time-travelling aliens who crash on Earth in the distant past and spark life on the planet. There are other elements in it which are wholly original, perhaps most notably the Electric Monk. This description applies to the original novel; the television adaptations, especially the US one, are very different.
  • Mot was indeed a French cartoon series about a purple monster who could travel through time and space, taking his young friend Leo on various adventures. It was based on the French children’s comics created by Alfonso Azpiri. It was aired on Australian television in the late 1990s.
  • Thanks to listener and supporter Molokov, who pointed out that Rincewind’s magical ability to find “bush tucker” might be a reference to retired army Major Les Hiddins, aka “the Bush Tucker Man“. Hiddins researched Australian native foods as part of his army career by working with Aboriginal peoples, mostly in northern Australia. He came to national fame through The Bush Tucker Man television series on the ABC in the late 80s and early 90s. In each episode Hiddins, wearing his trademark larger-than-usual Akubra hat, visited a part of Outback Australia and introduced viewers to the local edible plants and animals. Hiddins wrote several books, and then disappeared onto a remote retreat he created in the bush for retired army service people, before returning to the public eye in 2019 with a new website: bushtuckerman.com.au
  • We discussed Interesting Times back in episode 21, “Memoirs of Agatea“.
  • Black Sheep was released in 2006, written and directed by Jonathan King with special effects by Peter Jackson’s Weta Workshop. It seems the main way to watch it now is via the Amazon Prime Video streaming service, though it should also be available on DVD.
  • Terry has not always had kind things to say about Rincewind; he suggested the wizard’s job is “to meet more interesting people” than himself, lamented Rincewind’s lack of an inner monologue, and did indeed feel like he was running out of things to do with an eternally cowardly character. Agatha Christie’s negative feelings about Poirot are well-documented, from as early as 1930; in a notable quote from 1960 she describes him as a “detestable, bombastic, tiresome, ego-centric little creep”. But she refused to kill him off because she felt she had a duty to keep writing about a character that was still so popular with the public.
  • Michael Moorcock was an English fantasy author who created a number of characters including Elric of Melnibone, one of several incarnations of “the Eternal Champion”, fated to be reborn through the ages and battle in the primeval war between the forces of Law and Chaos.
  • We discussed Only You Can Save Mankind in our previous episode, “All Our Base Are Belong to You“.
  • Skippy the Bush Kangaroo (aka Skippy) was an Australian family television series about an usually smart kangaroo who helped park ranger’s son Sonny have various adventures. It was very much in the mould of Lassie or Flipper. It ran from 1968 to 1970, and there was a brief sequel series in 1992 featuring Sonny as an adult. It was broadcast in most Commonwealth countries, as well as the US and many Spanish-speaking countries including Mexico, Cuba and Spain.
  • We’ve mentioned it before, but you can find the Annotated Pratchett File at the old L-Space Web site. Its successor is the L-Space Wiki.
  • The Moa is a large extinct flightless bird, similar to a Cassowary. Like many megafauna of Australia and New Zealand, they were hunted to extinction, in the Moa’s case by the Māori peoples.
  • “Jeremy Bearimy” is an explanation of how time works in the afterlife in the sitcom The Good Place. Rather than a straight line, the flow of time there resembles a curve which looks like a signature reading “Jeremy Bearimy”. The dot in the i (or tittle) is a weird separate bit of spacetime.
  • “Guzzaline” was the term used for petrol in Mad Max: Fury Road, the fourth Mad Max movie, released in 2015. It stars Charlize Theron as Imperator Furiosa, a driver for a despotic warlord in post-apocalyptic Australia. Tom Hardy appears as Max Rockatansky, the titular character, who was the protagonist of the previous three films, where he was played by Mel Gibson.
  • When Liz refers to Darwin, she means the city, which is the capital of Australia’s Northern Territory. It was named for Charles Darwin by John Clements Wickham during a subsequent voyage of the ship Darwin took on his famous voyage, the HMS Beagle.
  • In Jurassic Park, palaeontologist Alan Grant claims to know that the Tyrannosaurus rex – portrayed in the films as a ferocious predator – has vision “based on movement”. This is one of many things that make no sense in the film. Have a few drinks with Ben, or your local friendly palaeontologist, and they’ll tell you about some others.
  • Richard Dawkins is now best known for heavy-handed criticism of religion and, most recently, feeling the need to confirm that whatever you think of it, eugenics works. But he initially found fame for his pretty good books on evolutionary biology. In The Selfish Gene, first published in 1976, he popularised the idea that the gene is the basic and most important unit of evolutionary information, and also coined the term “meme”, meaning the behavioural or cultural equivalent of a gene.
  • Historians, archaeologists and anthropologists frequently find evidence that revise the likely length of Aboriginal culture’s existence in Australia about every six months – usually making it older. Current estimates range from 50,000 to 125,000 years.
  • You can read about the Sydney baboon escape from late February 2020 in this article at The Guardian – written by previous Pratchat guest, Stephanie Convery! (Steph was a guest in #Pratchat2, and later returned for #Pratchat42.)
  • You certainly used to be able to get tea-towels and such that were supposedly from “Didjabringabeeralong, The Outback”, but these days we’d like to think we’re a bit more culturally sensitive. The unique names of many Australian towns and cities – like Wagga Wagga, Geelong and Nar Nar Goon – are drawn from local Aboriginal languages, many of which have been lost as those peoples were displaced or massacred by Europeans.
  • Tank Girl is a punk-inspired comic book series by created by British writer Jamie Hewlett and artist Alan Martin. Tank Girl is the main character, who lives in a tank in post-apocalyptic Australia. She’s accompanied on her adventures by her mutant kangaroo boyfriend, Booga. The comic was adapted into the 1995 film Tank Girl, directed by Rachel Talalay and starring Lori Petty as Tank Girl and Naomi Watts as her friend Jet Girl (who has a jetpack), with Malcolm McDowell as the antagonist. It has a cult following but was not a big success.
  • Listener Ian Banks in our Discord pointed out that another, probably more likely inspiration for the anthropomorphic animals is The Magic Pudding, a 1918 children’s book written and illustrated by famous Australian artist Norman Lindsay. The story’s main characters are Bunyip Bluegum (a koala person), human sailor Bill Barnacle, and Sam Sawnoff (a penguin person). The titular pudding, Albert, has a face, arms and legs, and regenerates, so he can supply an infinite amount of food. The story also features “pudding thieves” Patrick and Watkin, a possum and wombat respectively.
  • We want to make it clear that despite Liz’s hangups, marsupial pouches are not dirty; kangaroos lick theirs clean before their joeys enter them.
  • Barry McKenzie, a creation of Australian comedian Barry Humphries, began life as a comic strip character in the pages of UK comic magazine Private Eye in 1964. A parody of the Australian abroad, he is a hard-drinking, womanising, simple-but-forthright “larrikin” who gets himself into various scrapes. He was played by singer and actor Barry Crocker in two films in the 1970s, which also introduced Humphrie’s long-running character Dame Edna Everidge, who is Barry’s aunt. The films nearly killed director Bruce Beresford’s career, but he later went on to find fame and success, with such big films as Driving Miss Daisy and Mao’s Last Dancer.
  • “Squids” in the book is almost certainly a pun on “quid”, slang for a pound sterling in the UK and pre-decimal Australia. It’s still used occasionally as slang for money in Australia, usually in the phrase “a few quid”.
  • In case you missed it, the shearing competition in the book is clearly inspired by the Australian folk song “Click Go the Shears“.
  • We cut the discussion for time but “something for the weekend” reminded Ben of ska band Madness’s song “House of Fun”, which is about a teenager who has turned sixteen and is using various euphemisms to try and buy condoms at his local chemist.
  • In The Man From Snowy River, the actual description of the hero’s horse is “something like a racehorse undersized”.
  • As alluded to in the book, drop bears are a fictional cousin of the koala, a horrible killer animal which waits in treetops to drop on and eat children. Inventing dangerous creatures has been a long-running prank played on visitors to Australia, playing on their fears of the real deadly animals that live here. A recent incidence of the drop bear was this prank played on a UK reporter visiting to report on the bush fires.
  • The bush ballad “Waltzing Matilda” is thought by academics to describe the Great Shearer’s Strike of 1891, in which shearer’s killed a number of sheep and one of their number, being chased by police, killed himself rather than be taken alive. A lot of the slang in the song is never heard anywhere else anymore – including “jumbuck”, a term for sheep thought to have been derived from an Aboriginal language. There are many versions of the lyrics, but the most famous one was adapted by the Billy tea company. In some, Liz’s question becomes moot, as the troopers ask “Whose that jolly jumbuck”, rather than “Where’s“.
  • If you’re confused by Liz’s “cat in a bag” antics, you can read about Schrodinger’s Cat and other feline behaviours in our discussion of Pratchett’s non-fiction humour book The Unadulterated Cat. You’ll find it in #Pratchat22, “The Cat in the Prat“.
  • The Domestic Blindness sketch was indeed part of vintage 1980s Australian sketch comedy show The Comedy Company; you can find it on YouTube here.
  • Listener and previous guest Avril (who you might remember from #Pratchat16, “He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Vorbis“) points out that the god’s love of beetles is likely a reference to English geneticist and evolutionary biologist J. B. S. Haldane, perhaps most famous for writing about abiogenesis and the idea of “primordial soup”, among many other accomplishments. In response to being asked what his study of nature might reveal about the Creator, Haldane is perported to have said “that He is inordinately fond of beetles”, due to the phenomenal number and variety of beetle species. While this exact response might be apocryphal, he definitely said something equivalent many times, both in print and in speeches.
  • Gachnar the Fear Demon appears in the fourth season Halloween episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, “Fear, Itself”, from 1999.
  • Australian cockroaches are not actually Australian at all – they live all over the world, and probably originally come from somewhere in Africa.
  • White-tailed spiders are small spiders native to south-eastern Australia. They are not aggressive but might bite if disturbed, and like to hide among leaf litter. They were demonised in the media during the late twentieth century as their bite supposedly caused necrosis, but medical research in the early twenty-first century didn’t find evidence of any such symptoms. Instead, the spider’s venom caused only unpleasant but mild symptoms, especially by Australian standards.
  • The Stonefish is a real fish, one of the most venomous in the world. It disguises itself as a stone in order to catch smaller fish as prey, but has sharp spines on its back which deliver venom as a defence against predators. Four of the five species live outside Australian waters; their sting can be treated with hot water (which denatures the venom) and anti-venom.
  • Last Chance to See was a 1989 radio documentary following Douglas Adams and zoologist Mark Cawardine as they travelled the world to visit nine different endangered species. Adams turned it into a book in 1990, and in 2009 Stephen Fry joined Cawardine for a sequel television series, accompanied by a new book.
  • Pauline Hanson is a right-wing populist politician from Queensland who rose to fame when she ran for federal parliament in 1995 as a member of the conservative Liberal Party. They dis-endorsed her after she made racist comments about Aboriginal Australians, and she formed her own party, One Nation, and won a seat. She was found to have committed electoral fraud and jailed, though the charges were subsequently overturned on appeal. She left her own party in 2002 over those charges, but remained a figure in the Australian media, aided by appearances on breakfast television and the reality show Dancing with the Stars. She returned to politics and One Nation in 2013, and was elected to the Australian Senate in 2016. She is famous mostly for various racist views that very much align with those of Fair Go Dibbler.
  • Lost is a TV series about a bunch of plane crash survivors who find themselves lost on a mysterious island. It famously makes no sense whatsoever and it’s generally considered that it’s creators, JJ Abrams and Damon Lindelof, were making it up as they went along to stay ahead of the guesses of fans on the Internet about what was really going on.
  • The Galah (pronounced “ga-LAR”) is a large, loud pink and grey cockatoo (a type of parrot), common in many parts of Australia. “Galah” is also slang for a ridiculous or foolish person.
  • The Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras is a one of the largest pride parades in the world. It happens annually on the first Saturday in March, and started in 1978. It draws massive crowds from all over the world.
  • Intersex people are born with genetic and/or physical characteristics associated with both of the traditional genders. While the statistics are sometimes contested, it’s thought as many as 1.7% of people are born with some kind of intersex characteristics. The I in LGBTIAQ+ is for intersex.
  • The infamous Australian episode of The Simpsons, “Bart vs Australia”, is from the show’s sixth season in 1995.
  • The tough guy who appreciates art in Thief of Time is probably Newgate Ludd.
  • Damian Callinan’s The Merger started life as a one-man show, but was adapted in 2018 into a feature film. You can find it on the free streaming service Kanopy if you are a member of a library that subscribes to it, and its now on Netflix in many regions too.
  • The original Harry’s Cafe de Wheels started out in Woolloomooloo, a harbour-side inner suburb of Sydney, as a “caravan cafe” specialising in serving late night pies. It was founded by Harry “Tiger” Edwards in 1936. It’s been patronised by many international celebrities and there are now several Harry’s cafes around Sydney and New South Wales – though not, despite Ben’s later confusion, in Adelaide.
  • The word for the smell you get after it rains – specifically, the smell of earth after it rains – is “petrichor”. Hopefully it’s okay for us to use it as we’re not writing a poem.
  • Tropical areas – such as the northern part of Australia – are often described as having Wet seasons and Dry seasons. The Wet season is also known as monsoon season or the Rainy season in some parts of the world.
  • You can read about the six seasons described by the Kulin people of Melbourne on this web site.
  • To avoid any confusion: in Good Omens, it’s said that any cassette tape left in the glove box of a car transforms into Queen’s Greatest Hits. In Mort, it’s said that no matter what’s put into it during the day, a pantry raided in the middle of the night contains only some very specific and disappointing items.
  • “How to Make Gravy” is a 1996 song by Australian singer-songwriter (and national treasure) Paul Kelly. It was originally written and released as part of a Christmas charity album benefitting the Salvation Army, when Kelly found out the song he initially wanted to cover had already been picked by another band. In Kelly’s song the narrator, Joe, has been sent to prison; the lyrics are a letter he’s writing on December 21 (dubbed “Gravy Day” by some fans) lamenting that he won’t be home for Christmas, and giving his brother his gravy recipe, since that’s his usual contribution to the Christmas cooking. It became a surprise hit and was nominated for the APRA song of the year award in 1998. Below is the official video. (We’ll mention the song again in the Oggswatch Feast 2021 bonus Christmas episode.)
  • Captain Raymond Holt is the captain of police precinct 99 in the sitcom Brooklyn-99. He – like all the characters in the show – is wonderful.
  • Umami is the “fifth taste”, after the other basic tastes of sweet, sour, bitter and salty. The word comes from Japanese, and translates as “pleasant savoury taste”, being derived from the word umai, “delicious”. Other foods with an umami taste include various vegetables, mushrooms, shellfish, cured meats and green tea.
  • Barnaby Joyce is (as of March 2020) the current leader of the National Party, a conservative party popular in rural areas. They have a long-standing coalition with the Liberal Party; the Liberal-National coalition are currently in government. Tony Abbott is a former leader of the Liberal Party who was Prime Minister of Australia for a brief period, before being ousted in favour of the more moderate Malcolm Turnbull. He lost his seat at the last federal election. Both are pretty weird units, to use an Australian phrase, with their share of scandals, bizarre behaviour and controversy.
  • “Where the bloody hell are you?” was the key question asked by model Lara Bingle at the end of a largely ridiculed Australian tourism ad produced for the international market in 2006. It was controversially banned on release in the UK, despite costing 180 million Australian dollars, and despite its infamy was considered a failure. It was overseen by now Prime Minister Scott Morrison, who at the time was Managing Director of Tourism Australia; this led to some reprise of the question directed at him – including by Bingle herself on social media – when he was overseas on vacation during the beginning of the disastrous 2019-2020 bush fires. It was also part of the inspiration for his derisive nickname “Scotty from Marketing”. You can watch the original ad on YouTube here.
  • Paul Parker found internet fame after he angrily reacted to Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s comments that members of Australia’s volunteer fire fighting organisations “want to be out there” fighting the unprecedentedly fierce bushfires that raged in late 2019 and early 2020. In a video that went viral, he leaned out of his firetruck and asked a Channel 7 news crew to tell the Prime Minister to “go and get fucked from Nelligen”. After there were (disputed) claims this got him sacked from the Rural Fire Service (a volunteer organisation), another video emerged of him saying that Pauline Hanson was the only politician who cared about Australia. The whole saga is covered by Jan Fran in her first “The Frant” video for The Guardian.
  • “I’m not here to fuck spiders” is a slang expression meaning “I’ve got serious work to do,” most often used in response to a question about one’s intentions. It is also used as a more emphatic version of “I’m not here for a haircut”, which is a sarcastic response to being asked if one has come to a place to do the obvious thing, like being asked in a car dealership if you want to buy a car. It’s been a matter of debate for some years whether “not here to fuck spiders” is a “real” expression, or if it was invented as a joke and since been embraced by Australians. Looking through Google’s trends tool, which goes back as far as 2004, the first and biggest spike in searches for the phrase is in November 2005; then there’s very little until it slowly increases in search popularity from 2010, with smaller spikes since 2018 where it has been mentioned by Australian celebrities. The only reference Ben could find from 2005 were a series of replies to a forum post asking about the phrase, many of which seemed to suggest straight up examples of having heard it years before that… It’s worth mentioning that one of the repliers had come to the thread because they heard it from an Australian comedian, which might mean it was made up as a joke, or it could just mean that was the first time people who didn’t get it were hearing it.
  • The Man From Snowy River television show is not actually related to the 1982 film starring Sigrid Thornton and Tom Burlinson. The TV series starred Andrew Clarke as Matt McGregor, the stockman from the poem, and is set 25 years after the events depicted in the poem. It ran from 1993 to 1996.
  • Bore water is water drawn from underground sources, usually by drilling a borehole into an artesian aquifer – a porous underground layer of the Earth’s crust in which water is stored or flows. In Australia, the source is most commonly the Great Artesian Basin, a huge artesian aquifer under large parts of Queensland and its neighbour states.
  • “Advance Australia Fair” has been the official Australian anthem since 1984, though it was written far earlier, in the late 1870s. It was chosen in a plebiscite attached to the 1977 referendum about voting and political reforms. It beat “Waltzing Matilda”, “The Song of Australia”, and the previous anthem “God Save the Queen”. (For more on this, see #Pratchat53, “A (Very) Few Words by Hner Ner Hner“, in which we compare the Australian and Ankh-Morpork national anthems.)

 

#Pratchat58 – The Barbarian Switch

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We explore every author’s worst nightmare as writer Penny Love returns to Pratchat and finds the barrier between reality and fiction getting all wibbly-wobbly in Terry Pratchett’s 1988 short story, “Final Reward“.

After a particularly bad row with his girlfriend Nicky – and a pint of wine – author Kevin Dogger decides to kill off the protagonist of his best-selling fantasy series. The next morning, Erdan the Barbarian appears on Dogger’s doorstep with the milk. He was, after all, promised a final reward: an eternity of carousing in the halls of his creator…

Content note: the story “Final Reward” contains discussion of (fictional) suicide.
If you or anyone you know needs help, use the Wikipedia list of crisis lines to find one local to you.

Written for the short-lived roleplaying magazine G.M., “Final Reward” is Pratchett’s go at the age-old tradition of writers writing about writers. But in true Pratchett form, it’s not just about that… Hailing from around the time of Wyrd Sisters and Pyramids, but “tinkered with” before appearing in A Blink of the Screen, it depicts an author ill at ease with the real world and human relationships – by all accounts not much like Pratchett himself at all. And then there’s the way it ends…

What did you think of this one? Have you ever written a character you’d like to meet in person? Would you swap places with them? And is this a dig at any real fantasy authors, and we’ve missed the joke? Join in the conversation using the hashtag #Pratchat58 on social media.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:34:45 — 43.8MB)

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Guest Penelope Love is a writer best known for her roleplaying game work, especially with Chaosium for Call of Cthulhu, including the upcoming Victorian London campaign she mentions this episode. She previously joined us for #Pratchat45, “Hogswatch in Grune“, discussing the quite Lovecraftian “Twenty Pence with Envelope and Seasonal Greeting”. Penny is also part of Campaign Coins, who as well as making gorgeous metal coins for use with tabletop games, publish Penny’s comic fantasy short story collections about “The Three Dungeoneers”, which you can find here. Penny is on Twitter as @PennyLoveWrites, or you can follow @CampaignCoins for more on their projects.

As usual, you can find notes and errata for this episode on our website.

As previously advised, due to some technical difficulties – and not a time machine, to Ben’s disappointment – the next episode to be released will be #Pratchat57, discussing the third Long Earth novel, The Long Mars, with Joel Martin. Look for it in the Pratchat podcast feed on August 25.

Next month in #Pratchat59, we’re discussing The Science of Discworld III: Darwin’s Watch with science and fiction writer, Dr Kat Day! And after that, in October, it’s finally time for another general questions episode, #Pratchat60. This is the perfect opportunity to ask us about books you missed first time round, or general questions about Discworld, Pratchett, us and the show! Send in your questions for either of those episodes via social media (using the appropriate hashtag), or send us an email at chat@pratchatpodcast.com.

Want to make sure we get through every Pratchett book? You can support Pratchat for as little as $2 a month and get access to bonus stuff, including the exclusive supporter podcast Ook Club! Click here to find out more.

#Pratchat56 Notes and Errata

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These are the episode notes and errata for Pratchat episode 56, “do { Podcast(); } while ( unreadPratchetts > 0 );“, discussing the 1990 short story “#ifdefDEBUG + ‘world/enough’ + ‘time’” with guest Sean Williams.

Iconographic Evidence

Conspicuously missing from this section is that illustration from the German collection Der ganze Wahnsinn: Storys, but despite what much of the Internet is like it’s not actually okay to publicly share artwork without the artist’s permission.

However, it does appear in the picture section of A Blink of the Screen! There is presented the full, original artwork, which was painted for the cover of a 2001 German anthology of short stories, Retter der Ewigkeit, subtitled “Geschichten zwischen Diesseits und Jenseits” (roughly “Saviour of Eternity: Tales between this world and the afterlife“). This version shows the whole scene – unlike the versions used for either of the German collections – and answers a few of our questions, especially that the yellow leg is indeed that of Michael Dever in his AR chair. In the ebook edition it’s presented at quite a low resolution, and sideways (in the print edition it’s a double-page spread), which might be why Ben thought it was familiar but didn’t recognise where he’d seen it.

While it’s not amongst the images available on Josh Kirby’s official website, if we find it somewhere else public, we’ll point you to it. Sven and Ben have both shared the versions they have via the Pratchat Discord, so subscribers with access can see it there.

Notes and Errata

  • The episode title is valid C++ code, assuming that the function Podcast exists and updates the value of unreadPratchetts to avoid the podcast going on forever. Or is that what you all secretly want?
  • Philip K. Dick (1928-1982) – who’ll be mentioned quite a bit this episode – was an American science fiction author, many of whose novels and short stories have been famously adapted for the screen. These include The Man in the High Castle, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (adapted as Blade Runner), “We Can Remember It For You Wholesale” (adapted twice as Total Recall), “The Minority Report” (more about that in another note) and A Scanner Darkly, among others.
  • You can hear Sean’s episode of Splendid Chaps, “Three/Family“, over at the Splendid Chaps website. It was recorded on Sunday, 10 March 2013, at the pop-up Adelaide Fringe venue the Tuxedo Cat, and released on 23 March 2013.
  • Strata was Pratchett’s third novel, first published in June 1981, about two and a half years before The Colour of Magic. It’s features a science fiction version of the Discworld – a planet shaped like a flat disc, which seems to have been built by ancient aliens. It’s more-or-less a parody of Larry Niven’s popular Ringworld books, with many specific jokes and references. But we’ll say no more about it here, as we’ll definitely be covering it on the podcast in future.
  • The Ferals (1994-1995) was an Australian children’s television program on the ABC starring a mix of humans and puppet animals: Rattus, a rat; Modigliana, a feral cat; Mixy, a rabbit (her name is a pun on myxomatosis, a disease used to control wild pest rabbits in Australia); and a “dopey dog”, who it turns out is both not a dingo and not a Darren – his name is actually Derryn. While the original show only ran for two seasons, the puppet characters were very popular and continued to host and appear on other shows for several years. This included the five-minute Feral TV, in which the ferals ran a television station headed up by Kerry the Cane Toad (a clear parody of Kerry Packer, then owner of Australia’s Channel 9 TV network) and his assistant Rodney, a cockroach.
  • The story was written for the 1990 anthology Digital Dreams, edited by British writer, editor and sociologist specialising in religion, David V. Barrett. Barrett has a long history editing and writing for speculative fiction and similar magazines, including Vector and the Fortean Times. He also edited Tales From the Vatican Vaults, a collection of short fiction based on the premise of secret Vatican files being released to the public in an alternate history where Pope John Paul I reformed the Catholic Church. It was published in 2015, and features a few stories by authors who contributed to Digital Dreams. As we discussed, authors in the collection include Neil Gaiman, Diana Wynn Jones, Dave Langford, Storm Constantine, Ian McDonald, Keith Roberts and Andy Sawyer. You can see the cover and full list of authors at the book’s entry in the Speculative Fiction Database (SFDB).
  • The short story commentary in which Pratchett says “short stories cost me blood” and “I doubt I’ve done more than fifteen in my life” is “The Sea and Little Fishes”, which we discussed in #Pratchat39, “All the Fun of the…Fish?” The book in which this commentary appears, A Blink of the Screen, contains thirty-two short pieces of fiction. Admittedly, a few of those don’t really count as stories – see #Pratchat53 for three examples – but that’s not counting the four volumes of his early short stories for children, published separately.
  • Neil Gaiman’s short story about the troll under the bridge is titled, er… “The Troll Bridge” (or sometimes “Troll-Bridge”). It seems to have been first published in the short story collection Snow White, Blood Red in 1993, two years after the first publication of Pratchett’s story of the same name. The story was nominated for the World Fantasy Award in 1994, and has appeared in a few other places, including Gaiman’s own anthologies Angels and Visitations (1993 – probably the collection Sean is thinking of), Smoke and Mirrors (1998) and M is for Magic (2007), and was adapted into the comic book Ben read in 2016 by Colleen Doran. While he was certainly better known as a comics writer at the time, Gaiman had written and published several short stories by 1990, though his most famous short fiction came after Digital Dreams. One of his notable earlier stories is 1984’s “We Can Get Them for You Wholesale” – the title clearly riffing on Dick’s “We Can Remember It For You Wholesale” – about a young man who finds an assassin in the phone book and discovers they do bulk discounts, a very Pratchetty idea.
  • We discussed “Once and Future“, Pratchett’s 1995 short story for the collection Camelot, in #Pratchat49, “Once More, With Future“.
  • The “internal monologue” is the way many people think to themselves: in words. But while common, this is far from a universal experience – and most people assume others think in the same way as they do. Finding out otherwise often blows people’s minds, as with the cascade of articles and viral social media posts that cropped up in the way of this 2020 tweet:
  • “Atari” was never that widely-used as a synonym for game consoles, but “Nintendo” was – which is why some sources credit them with aggressively re-popularising the still fairly new generic term “game console” in the 1990s, so they could hang on to the trademark. It worked! And while some folks did (and do) use “Playstation”, “XBox” or even “Game Cube” as a stand-in for game console, those never became as widespread. (Earlier consoles were referred to as “game systems”, but by the time Nintendo massively dominated the market in the early 1990s, “console” – which differentiated a dedicated system for games from a more versatile personal computer, and from an arcade “cabinet” that could only play a single game – had become the preferred term.)
  • Genericisation can indeed make a product’s name ineligible as a trademark. This process is also known as “trademark erosion” or “genericide”, and in America – where most of the famous cases have occurred – it’s controlled by the Lanham (Trademark) Act. The Lanham Act allows a registered trade mark to be cancelled if it “becomes the generic name for the goods or services, or a portion thereof, for which it is registered”. In Australia, the Trade Marks Act 1995 has a similar clause: the mark can be cancelled if it “becomes generally accepted within the relevant trade as the sign that describes or is the name of an article, substance or service”. This has happened to some significant and surprising things: Aspirin and Heroin were both once trademark names used by the Bayer company! To protect against this modern drugs are often given a specific, non-proprietary name, with different company’s specific versions having trade names as well. Other famous examples include cellophane, dry ice, escalator, kerosene, laundromat, videotape and zipper! Examples like Hoover, Kleenex and Google (see below) have certainly become generic terms for a kind of thing, but not to the extent where a trademark has been revoked or expired. In Australia, the legal test seems to be whether the trade mark has become the only term used for a product or service.
  • The Google company went through a major restructuring in 2015 with the creation of Alphabet Inc, a new company which owned Google (the Internet services company that runs the search engine, GMail, YouTube and various other online services) and several other companies that were previously subsidiaries of Google. The driver behind this wasn’t a worry about genericisation; rather Google stated that wanted to make the company more accountable and give subsidiaries more freedom. But Google is commonly used to mean “search the Internet”, including as a verb (“I googled it”), and this has come up in court as a reason to cancel the trademark, as per the Lanham Act mentioned above. In 2017, a case in Arizona set a new precedent that the test for genericisation was whether the “primary significance of the trade mark in the minds of the consuming public” had become the product, rather than the producer. They ruled that while people did use “google” as a verb, they also understood Google was a company and not the only way to search the Internet.
  • Amstrad was a British computer company created by English tycoon and politician Alan Sugar. It operated between 1968 and 2010, and was most famous for their personal computers in the 1980s and 1990s. These included later iterations of the ZX Spectrum, which Amstrad bought from its original creator Sinclair Research, and the Amstrad Mega PC, a Windows-PC which also had a built-in Sega Mega Drive game console (known as the Sega Genesis in the US).
  • Hitachi is a Japanese company founded in 1910, which has grown into a conglomerate best known for their technology products. They no longer make personal or mainframe computers, but do make everything from military vehicles to air conditioners and the Hitachi Magic Wand, a “vibrating massager” introduced in 1968 which experienced a huge swell in sales when it featured in a 2002 episode of Sex and the City.
  • The 1980s-style retro-VR cyberpunk videogame trailer Ben remembered was for the game Jazzpunk, released in 2014. You can watch the live action Jazzpunk trailer on YouTube.
  • William Gibson’s Neuromancer, one of the first and most influential cyberpunk novels, was first published in 1984, so around six years before Pratchett wrote “#ifdefDEBUG + ‘world/enough’ + ‘time'”. Neuromancer popularised many terms and concepts which are now essential parts of the genre, and it’s also the only novel ever to have won the Nebula, Hugo and Philip K. Dick Awards.
  • “Carnie” is an American nickname for “carnival worker”; the traditional Australian equivalent is “showie”, short for “showman” or “showwoman”, since we call them “shows” rather than carnivals. We previously talked about this in #Pratchat51, where our previous research suggested the Australian term might even be a little older than the American one. (The surname in this story – and, most of the time, in real life – is spelled “Carney”.)
  • We dance around this a little in the episode, but clues in the story suggest that “Seagem” – the name for the artificial reality company that becomes a generic name for AR machines – comes from the acronym CGEM, which probably stands for “Computer Generated Environment Machines”.
  • The term AFOL, an acronym for “Adult Fan of Lego”, can be traced back to the newsgroup rec.toys.lego, where it was first coined by Matthew J. Verdier on the 14th of June, 1995 after another user, Jeff Thompson, was the first to use the phrase “adult fan of Lego”. It was a niche term for a decade or so, but in the 2010s not only had more people who grew up playing with Lego returned to it as adults, but the Lego company themselves realised there was a whole underserved market of adult Lego fans, and started making sets which would appeal to them. Unlike some other niche adult fandoms for things traditionally seen as “for kids”, the AFOL community often mingle with and involve young Lego fans too, and you’ll see whole families at Lego conventions, in stores and at events.
  • The word “paragorithm” appears in the context of Darren thinking you wouldn’t need something very complex to simulate most conversations with people, since they’re “just to reassure each other that they’re alive”. It might be a neologism Pratchett invented for “parallel algorithm”, a set of instructions for completing multiple tasks at once. These were relatively uncommon in computing at the time the story was written, since most computers weren’t capable of processing multiple instructions at once, but modern multi-threaded processors are specifically designed to do this and make extensive use of parallel processing.
  • “Technobabble” describes jargon-filled scientific-sounding nonsense, originally the sort used by technologists in the 1980s, but increasingly over time the sort used in science fiction to make it sound like the characters understand things we don’t. The term seems to have been derived from “psychobabble”, a term used to deride similar nonsense jargon used in popular psychology, coined in 1975 by writer R.D. Rosen and popularised by his 1977 book, Psychobabble: Fast Talk and Quick Cure in the Era of Feeling. Rosen specifically used the term to mean “an idiom that reduces psychological insight to a collection of standardised observations” – he was critical of the way psychology at the time sought to reduce the “infinite variety of problems” faced by people into a very small set of formal definitions.
  • “Handwavium” and “phlebotinum” are common fannish terms for substances, devices or phenomena in science fiction which behave in mysterious ways that nonetheless explain otherwise nonsensical events.
  • “Unobtainium” (or “unobtanium”) was originally engineering jargon, coined in the 1950s, for any theoretical substance that could solve a specific problem, if only it existed. It grew to also encompass substances that existed but were too expensive or rare for practical use, and by the 2000s had appeared in its traditional usage in several science fiction novels and films. In 2009, James Cameron used it as the seemingly actual name for the rare and highly valuable super-conducting mineral sought by the mining corporation his film Avatar, to much derision.
  • The book of Doctor Who memories mentioned by Ben is Behind the Sofa: Celebrity Memories of Doctor Who, edited by Steve Berry. Pratchett, while clearly not a big fan, seems mostly to have been motivated to write the introduction because it was a fundraiser for Alzheimers research. There are far too many celebrities of interest to Pratchat listeners for us to make a full list, but we will mention that the authors Ben Aaronovitch, Michael Moorcock and Gideon Defoe all appear, as does the creator of the often-mentioned-in-this-episode Black Mirror, Charlie Brooker.
  • As Ben mentions in the footnote, Handwavium is also a delightful Doctor Who podcast hosted by friends of Pratchat, “a fan and her Da (no, a fan and his daughter).” Yes, Ben managed to mess up their very cute intro, but if you want to hear a daughter and father duo discussing Doctor Who, this is the best show for it! Find it at handwavium.net.
  • My Year of Rest and Relaxation is a 2018 novel by American author Ottessa Moshfegh. We won’t spoil any more about it than Liz has already said, but we will note that it has been optioned to be adapted as a film by none other than Australia’s own Margot Robbie and her husband, Tom Ackerly.
  • The terms “fridged” and “breeder” refer to pervasive harmful tropes in the way women are portrayed in fiction, in both cases having them contribute to someone else’s story without getting to be characters in their own right. A “breeder” is a woman who only matters to the story as a mother or potential mother, while “fridging” is when a woman is killed off or harmed primarily to provide motivation for a male protagonist. The latter term was coined by comic book writer Gail Simone as the phrase “women in refrigerators”, named for a specific example of the trope from the Green Lantern comic. We previously discussed fridging in our discussion of Interesting Times in #Pratchat21, “Memoirs of Agatea“.
  • Space Invaders is a videogame developed by Tomohiro Nishikado, first released in 1978 as an arcade game by Taito Inc in Japan and Midway/Bally internationally. In case you’ve never seen it, the player controls a gun at the bottom of the screen that can move left and right, and fire straight upwards; the goal is to shoot increasingly fast and numerous waves of invading aliens before they reach the ground. Home console, computer and arcade machine versions of the game are still available today, largely unchanged except for nicer graphics and sound effects (though these often emulate the original designs). Elite is a videogame developed by British designers David Braben and Ian Bell, and first published by Acornsoft for personal computers in 1984. The player is a space pilot who operates as a freelance trader, buying and selling goods or turning to mercenary work or piracy to earn money and upgrade their ship. Its combination of space combat, wireframe 3D graphics and freedom to decide how you played made Elite a massive hit, and it spawned several sequels: Frontier: Elite II (1993), Frontier: First Encounters (1995) and more recently Elite Dangerous (2015), though these have become progressively more sophisticated. (Ben was probably thinking of Frontier: Elite II, the first one he encountered, which is why he thought there was a much bigger gap between Elite and Space Invaders.)
  • VR, Virtual Reality, is an entire simulated 3D world, while AR, Augmented Reality, is layering elements of a simulated world onto the real one. This has become a big deal over the last decade, with the launch of games like Pokemon GO that let you catch monsters at your local sightseeing spots, and hardware like the Google Glasses, that promise to deliver that Terminator-like heads up display without needing to surgically replace your eyeballs. So far, only the kind of AR that uses your mobile phone camera has really caught on, but there are new glasses and similar products touted every year…
  • It’s well-documented that Neil and Terry exchanged floppy disks via mail to write Good Omens. Here’s one of many sources for this info: Neil answering a fan’s question about the book on Tumblr in 2019.
  • Ben probably mentioned Pratchett’s interview with Bill Gates in one of our bonus episodes. It was for GQ Magazine in 1995, and unearthed by Marc Burrows during research for his biography, The Magic of Terry Pratchett, in May 2019. (You can see his viral tweet, which includes an excerpt, below.) The idea that Terry had predicted “fake news”, online misinformation and and the return of nazis twenty-four years earlier was written up in The Guardian, Gizmodo and many other news sites at the time, though as Marc notes in a follow up tweet, Gates was on the money later in the interview about the fate of physical media.
  • Grand Theft Auto, abbreviated GTA, is a series of videogames launched in 1997, originally developed by British company DMA Design. The first two games were modest successes, and featured a top-down 2D city in which the player could steal and sell cars, cause car crashes and commit other crimes as they tried to get to a goal number of points, expressed in dollars. Grand Theft Auto III translated the open world of the game to a 3D environment, and it and its sequels have been hugely successful: Grand Theft Auto V is still one of the biggest selling videogames nearly a decade after it was first published in 2013. This is partly because of its online mode, which regularly adds new content and lets players team up and commit crimes together. Since the series got popular, DMA Design was acquired by Rockstar especially for the last few games produced by Rockstar, it has been a constant source of controversy. Some of it is deserved; for example, the games are pretty misogynistic, featuring no playable female characters (except for ones you create yourself in the online version), and relying on ageing tropes of crime fiction for its female NPCs, who are all wives, sex workers and family members. It’s also held up as evidence of videogames’ influence on young people, supposedly leading them to crime and violence, but the evidence of that is less certain. The culture of players around the game, however, is definitely a problem, as it is with the broader world of mainstream videogames.
  • “The Minority Report” was originally a novella by Philip K Dick, first published in Fantastic Universe magazine in January 1956. It imagines a future in which three mutant “precogs” have pre-cognitive abilities, and predict all crime, but the creator of the Precrime department is led to discover more about how it all works when they predict he’ll murder someone he’s never heard of. It was adapted as a film, Minority Report, directed by Steven Spielberg and starring Tom Cruise in 2002, and a sequel television series set a decade later. The film and TV show change many things about the original story, including the nature and abilities of the precogs, and the ending of the story. We previously mentioned it in #Pratchat16, “He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Vorbis“.
  • Black Mirror, mentioned many times this episode, is a British speculative fiction anthology show, mainly focusing on the consequences of technology. It was created by Charlie Brooker for Channel 4 in 2011, before being acquired by Netflix in 2015. There have been five series of 3-6 episodes, plus a Christmas special featuring multiple related stories, and an interactive “choose your own adventure” style film, Bandersnatch. Some episodes do rely on a reveal for their full impact, so we’ll be careful about spoilers, but here are some that are especially relevant to our discussion:
    • People living on digitally after death – or as a copy of a living person – feature in “Be Right Back” from series two, “San Junipero” from season three, and “USS McCallister” and “Black Museum” from series four.
    • Augmented Reality technology editing your experience of the real world appears in the special “White Christmas” and the episodes “Men Against Fire” from series three, and “Playtest” and “Arkangel” from series four.
    • Full Virtual Realities appear in many episodes, but often as a surprise or twist, so the only one we’ll mention is season five’s “Striking Vipers”.
  • We previously discussed the true nature of the Emerald City in #Pratchat12, “Brooms, Boats and Pumpkinmobiles“. In The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, visitors to the City are made to wear green-tinted glasses, and only the external walls are actually green. This idea is dropped in later books (of which there are thirteen!), which describe the city as green and don’t mention the glasses. It’s one of many differences between L Frank Baum’s original Oz books and the popular film adaptation.
  • To look through rose-coloured (or rose-tinted) glasses is to see something in its most favourable light, ignoring its negative aspects. The phrase definitely pre-dates The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, as use of it dates back to at least 1838, when it appears in Slight Reminiscences of the Rhine, Switzerland, and a Corner of Italy by English writer and traveller Mary Boddington (1776-1840). The use of “rosy” or “rose-coloured” as euphemisms for things being generally happy or pleasant is much older, attested as early as the 1700s, and probably stems from the earlier idea that having a rose-coloured complexion was seen as a sign of good health in Europe by around 1590.
  • It’s actually surprisingly difficult to get an accurate word count for books and stories; it’s not a commonly recorded statistic, and ebooks don’t tell you how long they are either (or let you copy and paste the text so your word processor can tell you.) We’re looking into a solution for this! Note that this work has already been done for many of the Discworld novels.
  • We’ve mentioned Jasper Fforde many times before; his most famous series of books are the Thursday Next series, about a detective, Next, who enters the worlds of books to solves crimes.
  • As mentioned, the story’s title is a reference to the opening lines of the poem “To His Coy Mistress” by English author Andrew Marvell. It was first published after his death, in 1681. The opening lines of the poem are: “Had we but World enough, and Time / This coyness, Lady, were no crime.” Other uses of “World Enough and Time” include the episode of Doctor Who mentioned by Ben (the penultimate episode of the tenth series, first broadcast in June 2017), and several books, including novels by Robert Penn Warren, James Kahn, and Joe Haldemann, the latter changing the title to Worlds Enough and Time.
  • Reception theory, or audience reception, is the idea that each individual reader (or listener, watcher, player etc) of a work receives, interprets and understands it through their own cultural frame of reference. Generally agreed ideas about what a work means emerge through consensus, usually amongst individuals who share a common cultural background. It stems from the work of German academic Hans-Robert Jauss (1921-1997) in the 1960s, and popularised and expanded by Jamaican-born British cultural theorist Stuart Hall (1932-2014) in the 1970s and 1980s.
  • The “Hannibal” to which Sean refers is Hannibal Lecter, specifically the version of the character who appears in the television series Hannibal, played by Mads Mikkelsen. Lecter is a forensic psychiatrist assigned to observe FBI profiler Will Graham, who has a talent for imagining himself in the role of – and thus catching – serial killers. But Lecter is himself secretly a cannibalistic serial killer, and as well as considering himself far smarter than the police (who are far from catching him), also tries to tip Will over the edge into becoming a killer himself. Lecter is best known from Anthony Hopkins’ portrayal in the 1991 film adaptation of Thomas Harris’ 1988 novel Silence of the Lambs, in which another FBI agent visits the killer in prison to enlist his help catching another killer. The television series draws instead on the other novels in which he appears: Red Dragon (1981), Hannibal (1999) and Hannibal Rising (2006). The television series was widely acclaimed and ran for three seasons on NBC between 2013 and 2015.
  • “The Gersnback Continuum” is a 1981 short story written by William Gibson. In it, a photographer is tasked withtroversy as police acti taking pictureons of “futuristic” 1930s architecture. He begins to experience visions of the alternate future world imagined by the architects and the likes of Hugo Gernsback, the publisher who pioneered pulp science fiction in the 1920s when he created the magazine Amazing Stories. The story coined the term “Raygun Gothic” for the architectural style it describes; in the story, this name is given by Cohen Downes, an editor for the London-based publisher who hires the photographer. The story was adapted in 1993 as a short film, Tomorrow Calling, originally broadcast on Channel 4 television.
  • The meme “The World If” (aka “The World Without…”, “What Society Would Be If…” etc) depicts a futuristic, supposedly utopian cityscape, accompanied by text informing us this is what the world would be like, if only one thing were different. It dates back to 2018, with the earliest example referring to the jailing of rapper Bobby Shmurda, which drew controversy for a variety of reasons, including police acting on supposedly autobiographical rap lyrics, which supposedly listed his real crimes.
  • Upload (not Uploaded) is an Amazon Original streaming series created by Greg Daniels, best known for co-creating the US version of The Office and Parks and Recreation with Michael Shur. It’s set in 2033 in a future where humans can have their consciousness uploaded into a digital afterlife as they die. The protagonist, Nathan Brown (played by Robbie Amell), dies unexpectedly and is uploaded, but he’s not free of his even more possessive, still-living girlfriend, Ingrid (Allegra Edwards), which is one of the unfortunate tropes of the show. Meanwhile his “angel” Nora (Andy Allo) – the handler from the afterlife company who looks after him – starts to think his death was suspicious. It’s run for two seasons since 2020, with a third on the way.
  • Severance is an Apple TV+ streaming series created by first-time show runner Dan Erickson. It stars Adam Scott (also best known from Parks and Recreation) as Mark, an employee at Lumon Industries. Mark works on the “severed floor”, where he and the other workers have undergone a procedure which means they can’t access their memories of their regular lives while at work, and vice versa. Ben’s only seen the first episode so far but agrees with Sean that it’s great, though be aware it’s a thriller rather than a comedy.
  • The Usborne computer books were published in the 1980s for Usborne, a UK publisher of children’s educational books. They were phenomenally popular, not least because they were approachable introductions to everything from how computers worked to how to program them at a time when most computer books were full of jargon. As well as ghosts the books also featured monsters and robots. While the originals are hard to find in print, in 2015 Usborne made them available for download from their website. Ben is pretty sure he had The Usborne First Book of the Computer from 1984, which seems rarer than the others. This might be because as far as Ben can tell it was a compilation of content from the “First Computer Library” series: All About Computers, Computer Fun and Simple BASIC. (The last two of those appear at the bottom of the page linked above, and include the computer ghosts.)
  • Agent Smith is the primary antagonist of the Wachowskis’ 1999 film, The Matrix. A computer program tasked with rooting out rogue humans connecting to the Matrix, he and his fellow Agents appear as Men in Black, with sunglasses, black suits and an earpiece. There’s something a bit off about him in the first film; he returns in the sequels The Matrix Reloaded and The Matrix Revolutions as a virus-like threat both to the free humans of Zion and the machines themselves, as he gains the ability to rewrite other programs and human consciousnesses into copies of himself. We previously talked about Smith in #Pratchat48, “Lu-Tze in the Sky with Lobsang“.
  • We previously talked about La Traviata (“the fallen woman”) in #Pratchat23, “The Music of the Nitt“. It’s an 1853 opera written by Italian composer Giuseppe Verdi, with a libretto by Francesco Maria Piave based on the French 1848 novel and 1852 play La Dame aux camélias, known in English as Camille, by Alexandre Dumas fils (son of the famous one you’re thinking of). Liz reviewed Opera Australia’s 2022 production of La Traviata for The Age.
  • We mention a few films and television series about living people this episode:
    • The Social Network is a 2010 film directed by David Fincher and written by Aaron Sorkin, adapted from the 2009 non-fiction book The Accidental Billionaires by Ben Mezrich. It tells the – or at least a – story of the creation of Facebook by Mark Zuckerberg (played by Jesse Eisenberg) in 2003, and the legal problems he faced over ownership of the idea and original website. It’s a fictionalised account, and its accuracy has been disputed; Zuckerberg was also not happy about it, saying at the time that “I wish no-one had made a movie about me while I was still alive”. Historical accuracy aside, it’s pretty great, and also stars Andrew Garfield as Eduardo Saverin, co-creator of the original “The Facebook”, and features a killer soundtrack by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross.
    • Rocketman is a 2019 Elton John biopic starring Taron Egerton as Elton John (though it was originally supposed to be Tom Hardy), and Jamie Bell as his writing partner Bernie Taupin. It was directed by Dexter Fletcher, who may be known to listeners from his role as a young man playing Spike in the UK series Press Gang. (Fletcher had previously stepped in to finish directing Bohemian Rhapsody, the 2018 Queen biopic centred on Freddie Mercury, after Bryan Singer was fired from the project.) In contrast to The Social Network, Elton John had been trying to make a film about his life for decades, and is an executive producer on this film. (Reaction to Bohemian Rhapsody was decidedly more mixed, particularly regarding its handling of Mercury’s sexuality and family, amongst other things.)
    • Pam & Tommy is a 2022 Hulu streaming miniseries about the three-year marriage between actor Pamela Anderson (played by Lily James) and Mötley Crüe drummer Tommy Lee (played by Sebastian Stan), revolving mostly around the theft and public release of a sex tape they made on their honeymoon. It was based on a 2014 Rolling Stone article, “Pam and Tommy: The Untold Story of the World’s Most Infamous Sex Tape“. While some aspects of the production were praised, many critics pointed out that it is a story of the exploitation of Pamela Anderson without her consent – made without her consent. (She was apparently contacted to be involved in some way, but did not want to be part of it; some sources say its production caused her some distress.)
  • Biopics – whether about the living or dead – don’t legally require the permission of the subject because they are, at least in theory, based on the facts of someone’s life – and facts are not considered intellectual property. This is the same principle that allows for unauthorised biographies (many of which become the basis of biopics). Generally the only legal recourse if someone doesn’t like how they’re portrayed is to sue via libel or defamation laws, but those put the burden of proof and money on the person mounting the claim, so even wealthy subjects don’t often consider it worth trying.
  • The simulation hypothesis – the idea that we’re all simulated people in a hyper-realistic simulation of the world – has been around for a while. It was made popular by the release of The Matrix in 1999, and then again by Swedish philosopher Nick Bostrom in 2003. In Bostrom’s version, the idea is that future humans will build computers so powerful that they will be able to run millions of incredibly detailed simulations of all of human history, including human minds as sophisticated as real ones. If that were to happen, then the vast majority of human-like minds to ever exist would be simulated ones, and so it’s plausible to suggest that’s what we are – artificial minds in a computer simulation of the world.
  • Ben’s Virtual Reality game is Table of Tales: The Crooked Crown by Tin Man Games. In the game, the player is bequeathed the magical “Table of Tales” by a deceased aunt, and it comes to life. A mechanical bird, Arbitrix, is the Table’s Game Master, and helps the player take control of a group of “scoundrels” who are at first dubbed heroes, then years later framed for a crime they didn’t commit, and must go on a high seas fantasy adventure to find out who’s behind it. It plays like a single-player tabletop roleplaying game, with cards and dice for powers, direct manipulation of the pieces, and a branching narrative with multiple possible endings. The game was originally released exclusively for PlayStation VR in 2019, and was a finalist for the “Excellence in Narrative” category at the 2019 Freeplay Awards. In the last year or so it’s been released on other platforms too: PC via Steam in 2021, and in July 2022, Nintendo Switch and the Meta Quest 2 standalone VR headset. The PlayStation VR and Quest versions are VR-only; the Switch version doesn’t support VR; and the Steam version can be played either way.
  • The other Dungeons & Dragons-like VR games Ben mentions are:
    • Demeo (Resolution Games, 2021) – a multiplayer VR game similar in many ways to Table of Tales – so much so that it’s frequently mentioned in Table of Tales reviews! It’s available on Steam, Steam VR, Meta Quest and Meta Rift.
    • TaleSpire (Bouncyrock Entertainment) – not actually VR, and not a game in itself… TaleSpire is a virtual 3D environment for use with tabletop roleplaying games like Dungeons & Dragons, letting you build and share a virtual map and miniatures with other players. As of writing (July 2022) it’s still in Early Access on Steam, meaning you can buy it early to access a working but incomplete version as its being finished.
  • Wii Fit (2008) was Nintendo’s fitness game for their popular Wii game console. As well as the “Wii-mote” motion controllers, it used a custom “balance board” that ould measure the player’s centre of balance and weight, using this to assess fitness based on the (often criticised) Body-Mass Index, or BMI. Fitness activities available in the game included yoga, aerobics and other exercises, and it was a huge hit for Nintendo. Combined with Wii Fit Plus, the updated version released in 2009, it’s estimated to have sold nearly 44,000,000 copies worldwide, putting it just outside the top ten biggest-selling console games of all time.
  • Zero Latency is a free-roam VR experience company which started up in Melbourne in 2015. The “free roam” part means that players are free to move around a play area, with their movement relative to the game world and each other tracked by cameras. This is in sharp contrast to most VR games, especially headsets available for use at home, where the player remains mostly stationary while the game world moves around them. Since its launch its grown considerably, with nine locations in Australia and nearly fifty more in twenty-five other countries around the world. While most of their games are in the first-person shooter style, and the game Ben remembers is no longer on offer, they do have Engineerium, a puzzle game which sounds like it’s in a similar vein.
  • Liz’s phrase “Too much time down at the Jasmine Allen” is a reference to the perpetually crime-ridden Jasmine Allen housing estate in long-running UK police drama The Bill.
  • Terry’s poem “An Ode to Multiple Universes” was first published in the October-November 2005 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. The book in which it was collected is untitled but generally known as Terry Pratchett’s Folio or the MMXIV Green Folio, and was published for the 2014 Discworld Convention, where copies were given to attendees with a special bookmark labelling it a present from Terry. Fifty copies made it to the Australian Discworld Convention in 2015, and a few more were sold via discworld.com with proceeds going to charity.
  • Of Sean’s more than fifty novels, he suggests Pratchett fans might enjoy Her Perilous Mansion, his standalone middle grade fantasy novel first published in April 2020. The “sidequel” coming later this year (2022) is Honour Among Ghosts.

Thanks for reading our notes! If we missed anything, or you have questions, please let us know.

#Pratchat3 – You’re a Wizzard, Rincewind

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In episode three, comedian Cal Wilson is back to discuss the book that started her passion for Terry Pratchett – Sourcery! The fifth Discworld novel, published in 1989, it features the return of the inept wizard Rincewind.

Rincewind is very happy to have left his adventuring days behind him, working as assistant librarian at Unseen University in Ankh-Morpork, the Disc’s premiere college for wizards. But just as a new archchancellor is about to be named, the young boy Coin arrives. He is the eighth son of an eighth son of an eighth son – a Sourcerer, a source of raw magic, something not seen on the Disc since the ancient time of the Mage Wars. As he takes over the university and wizards across the world awaken power they’ve never known, the end of the world draws nigh…and Rincewind just can’t seem to avoid getting involved.

Rincewind was Pratchett’s first protagonist, and this novel exemplifies all the things that make us love him: genre-awareness, unrepentant cowardice, reluctant heroism, lack of any skill at wizardry and fierce self-identification as a wizard. It also sees the return of the Luggage, a living chest which follows Rincewind wherever he goes. It was a delight for us all to see these characters again, and we have grand plans to go back to their beginnings in the very first Discworld novels… In the meantime, when you’ve finished listening to this episode, get ready for the next one by reading Wyrd Sisters! We’ll be recording on January 14th, so get your questions in ASAP if you’d like us to answer them on the podcast.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:32:03 — 91.8MB)

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Guest Cal Wilson is a stand-up comedian and children’s author. She previously appeared in our first episode, “Boots Theory“, and is still on Twitter at @calbo. Her new live stand-up show, Hindsight, will be playing in multiple cities at festivals throughout 2018: this page at comedy.com.au lists a bunch of them. (You can also see the poster she mentions; it really is good!)

You can find the full notes and errata for this episode on our web site.

Want to make sure we get through every Pratchett book? You can support Pratchat for as little as $2 a month and get access to bonus stuff, including the exclusive supporter podcast Ook Club! Click here to find out more.

#Pratchat11 – At Bill’s Door

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For our eleventh episode we welcome Pratchett fan Sarah Pearson to the mic to discuss a Discworld novel of two halves: Reaper Man! The eleventh Discworld novel, published in 1991, Reaper Man is the second book to focus on Death and the newly stable faculty of Unseen University.

The faceless bureaucrats of the multiverse have decided Death is sentimental and inefficient, and he’s been fired! While he heads off to live among humans for his remaining time – until his replacement comes to claim him – his absence means those who die sort of…don’t. That includes Windle Poons, 130-year-old wizard of Unseen University, whose return as a zombie gives him a new lease on life – much to the horror of his fellow faculty members. But Death’s absence is having other weird consequences: objects spring to life, non-human species spawn their own Deaths, and strangest of all, a warehouse in Ankh-Morpork mysteriously fills with small glass orbs…

Reaper Man‘s two mostly separate plots – Death’s forced retirement, and the wizards’ investigation of the alien lifeforms – bring back not only Death but also Windle Poons and the faculty of Unseen University, both introduced in Moving Pictures, alongside cameos by familiar faces like CMOT Dibbler and Fred Colon. Plus we meet a bunch of new and memorable characters: the Death of Rats, the Auditors of Reality, Mrs Cake and her daughter Ludmilla, and undead activist Reg Shoe and his friends from the Fresh Start Club. It’s a big cast, but then with two separate plots there’s plenty for them to do! We’d love to hear what you thought of Reaper Man; use the hashtag #Pratchat11 on social media to join the conversation.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:59:47 — 54.9MB)

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Sarah Pearson appeared on the ABC quiz show Hard Quiz, and works as a captioner for television.

In our next episode we’ll be joined by editor Jackie Tang as we power on to the next Discworld novel and travel far from the lands we know in Witches Abroad! We’re recording only a week after this episode is released, so to have us answer them on the podcast, get your questions via social media before September 15, 2018 using the hashtag #Pratchat12.

You’ll find the full notes and errata for this episode on our web site.

Want to make sure we get through every Pratchett book? You can support Pratchat for as little as $2 a month and get subscriber bonuses, like the exclusive bonus podcast Ook Club!